{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["http://paulryan.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=356814", "Ryan discusses Obamacare\u2019s rollout and the budget conference", "2013-10-28", "2013", "2013-10", "Republican", "House", "WI", "Paul Ryan", "R000570", "paulryan.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Earlier today, First District Congressman Paul Ryan spoke with WLIP\u2019s Bill Lawrence about the upcoming budget-conference-committee meeting and the botched rollout of HealthCare.Gov. Excerpts of the interview follow.\nObamacare\u2019s bungled rollout:\n\u201cWe have been sitting in these oversight hearings on Obamacare in Congress for months, seeing this train wreck coming, knowing that people are going to have huge premium increases\u2014people are going to lose the insurance that they have and like, or people wouldn\u2019t even be able to get on the insurance website.\u00a0 They were given warnings. They\u2014meaning the administration and the Department of Health and Human Services\u2014[knew] that this thing wasn\u2019t ready, yet they pressed ahead anyway. We gave them three or four opportunities to, at the very least, delay the law or delay the individual mandate. And they said no on each one of these things. I mean, right now, you\u2019re going to have to pay a fine if you don\u2019t have insurance. But their website is so bad that you can\u2019t even buy the insurance. So why would you make somebody pay a fine?\u201d\nOverseeing Obamacare\u2019s implementation:\n\u201cI\u2019ve been trying for about two months to get Kathleen Sebelius to come testify [before the House Budget Committee], and she has refused. Congress is supposed to do its oversight of the executive branch. She finally agreed to come and testify to another committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee. We have the person who is the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services coming to testify tomorrow before the Ways and Means Committee. That\u2019s one of the key people in charge of rolling out Obamacare, and she\u2019s one of the people who was telling us earlier in the year and gave us all of these indications that this thing was ready. . . . \n\u201cWhen I see a secretary of Health and Human Services seeing all this evidence that this isn\u2019t going to be ready\u2014that people are going to get confused, or people are going to lose insurance and they are going to have gap[s] in coverage\u2014and then they proceed ahead anyway, that\u2019s what was concerning to me. But more to the point, she said everything was going to be perfect, everything was going to be right. It was going to be on time, it was going to work, and she was given evidence to the contrary. And she misled Congress in that sense. That\u2019s why I was concerned.\u201d \nThe prospects for a successful budget conference:\n\u201cI don\u2019t want to get ahead of ourselves or raise expectations too high because in this kind of divided government, to get a, really what I call a \u2018grand bargain\u2019\u2014and a grand bargain to me is, \u2018We are going to balance to budget, we\u2019re going to pay off the debt, we\u2019re going to make Medicare permanently solvent, we\u2019re going to fix our big, fiscal problems\u2019\u2014it\u2019s extremely clear to me that the President doesn\u2019t want to do an agreement like that. If we try for an agreement like that, both sides are going to demand the other one compromises core principles, and we\u2019ll just talk about our differences, and we\u2019ll go into another food fight.\n\u201cWhat I want to do is look for common ground, see where we can find those areas of understanding and agreement, and pass those. Meaning: Let\u2019s take a chop at the tree of our fiscal problems. Let\u2019s get a down payment on our debt and our deficit.\n\u201cI would rather have smarter spending cuts than the sequester. We\u2019ll take the sequester spending cuts if that\u2019s all we have to get spending under control and get the deficit under control. But I\u2019d rather do it in a smarter way.\n\u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m starting Wednesday with these budget talks. I\u2019m hoping we can do that. I\u2019m sure people will point fingers at each other. It\u2019s Washington, so it\u2019ll be a bit of a partisan show. But I like to think we can find that common ground\u2014make a difference on the debt. I would love to see this divided government work a little bit, and that would be a confidence builder for the economy, for the country, for the credit markets.\u201d\nSearching for common ground:\n\u201cI put an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about ten days ago that said, \u2018Here are the things in the President\u2019s budget that we like. Here\u2019s some common ground on things that we can do that we like.\u2019 That\u2019s what I was trying to do\u2014[which] is, start the conversation as a Republican talking about the things the President proposed in his budget that we would agree to. I just wanted to go first with that kind of a move by showing where I think we can start looking for common ground, and let\u2019s go do that. That\u2019s basically the process I\u2019m trying to get started here.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["http://paulryan.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=356814"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.777948647737503, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}