Obama’s Remarks to the Business Roundtable - Washington Wire ...

What is true, though, is that in the current global, highly competitive environment that the burdens and benefits, the dislocations of that dynamism are disproportionately borne by workers in certain sectors, in certain regions. And that creates great pain, it creates great hardship. And so part of what we want to figure out is how do we make sure that the burdens and benefits of this dynamic economy are spread in a way that maintains strong political and social support for that dynamism.

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And so figuring out how we’re training people for the right jobs, that requires consultation with business. You guys can help us identify what are the particular skill sets that people are going to need so that working with community colleges, universities, vocational programs, apprenticeship programs, we are teeing that up.

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But having said that, I also just have a very hard-headed analysis about this, which is the path we’re on is unsustainable. If you have six, eight, 10 percent health care inflation every single year, at some point we are all broke; businesses are broke, or you stop providing health care to your employees. The federal government is way broke with Medicare and Medicaid. State governments are groaning under the weight of this stuff; it’s consuming everything.

So what that also means though — and this is something I’ve tried to emphasize to my more progressive friends — we can’t simply just add on a whole bunch of people to a broken system, because that’s also unsustainable. You can’t just take people who are currently uninsured, plop them on to a system that is generating those kinds of costs, not dig into the engine and try to figure out how to make the thing run more efficiently, because then you’ll just be broke that much faster. And at some point, you start making very draconian decisions about people losing benefits.

So the cost issue is the thing that we actually think is the big driver in this whole debate. And that’s why — I know you heard from Peter Orszag — things like comparative effectiveness, health IT, prevention, figuring out how our reimbursement structures are designed under Medicare and Medicaid. Medical liability issues — I think all those things have to be on the table. And I won’t lie to you that everybody agrees on this theoretically until you start getting into the specifics. And oftentimes though, Ivan, one of the things I’ll note, is the resistance is not based on evidence, it’s based on people’s interests. Everybody is kind of dug in. They know that the system doesn’t work, but at least it kind of works for them in one particular aspect.

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I just wanted to comment that a number of us in the business community are concerned that a hundred percent auction will effectively be a tax that would impose significant costs on energy-intensive industries such as some that we operate, and may impact existing industries’ ability to fund needed investments in new low-carbon technologies.

I just wondered if you could explain how the hundred percent auction approach would work in our highly challenged economy — because we’re all feeling a lot of pressure today on costs — and yet still preserve jobs for existing industries, and strengthen our existing manufacturing sector.

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I was talking to some members of Congress just yesterday, you know, who were concerned about this, because I’m sure they’re hearing from industries and, you know, what does this mean economically, et cetera. I just want to point out, you know, anybody who has been to Las Vegas recently and looked at Lake Mead; or who is familiar with what’s happening in agriculture in California right now; or go down to Atlanta, which may not have any water soon, because of what’s happening in terms of changing weather patterns; or talk to Kevin Rudd in Australia — that’s going to cost us money too. It’s just not — it’s not priced.

And I’m not somebody who — I’ve never bought into these Malthusian — woe — Chicken Little, the earth is falling — I tend to be pretty optimistic. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t pretty optimistic. But I think this is — the science is overwhelming. This is a real problem. It will have severe economic consequences, as well as political and national security and environmental consequences.

And I’m confident that if we do it smart, if we’re talking to you guys, if we’re talking to industries, if our projections don’t end up being wildly unrealistic, then I think we can handle this problem.

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