MSNBC "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" - Transcript

Interview

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Joining me now--as promised--the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight: Sheldon Whitehouse.

Senator, thanks for your time tonight.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), RHODE ISLAND: Good to be with you, Keith. Thank you.

OLBERMANN: How is this not a no-brainer? How do Republicans fight you on this?

WHITEHOUSE: I don‘t know, you got me. This is the perfect family. Kerry Burns and her husband Patrick both worked. They are a hard working American couple. She had worked since she was 14 years old.

They had a baby boy. They had health insurance. Everything looked ideal.

And then comes the diagnosis that their little boy has cystic fibrosis, and the nightmare of all that medical care and ultimately losing their son begins. And on top of that, it gets piled on the nightmare of dealing with our broken health care system and of dealing with a bankruptcy system that treats them as if they were crooks, as if they were there to abuse the system.

OLBERMANN: And we‘re not--nobody is asking and you‘re not proposing a bailout for each of these families--to use the appropriate term. You are asking, simply to make what is an ugly and life-changing process, in addition to the horror that they‘ve gone through, an ugly and life-changing process of bankruptcy. Just a little bit faster and a little kinder, is that essentially what you are asking?

WHITEHOUSE: Yes. The human element of this is really important. We‘ve talked about the health care problem in terms of, you know, socialized medicine and all these concepts. We talked about bankruptcy.

Here is a mother, in the intensive care unit with her dying son, and she is being bombarded by collection agencies, calling her on the cell phone. When the boy dies, and she has to come home to Rhode Island, she has to sell goods on eBay to pay for the gas and tolls home because she‘s broke.

And when he gets back and tries to go into bankruptcy, she has to undergo credit counseling, and answer questions like, "What has this experience taught you about better managing your credit?" I mean--and she‘s doing this to a machine. There‘s a computer on the other side of the credit counseling.

I‘ll tell you, for a party that likes to say the government should keep out of people‘s lives, this is government requiring a mother who just lost her son to go through nonsensical credit counseling just to string out the process longer. I think the original purpose of this bill was to string out the process longer so that credit cards could make more money of people longer. But let‘s at least carve out people who had a medical catastrophe.

OLBERMANN: Do you sometimes feel, Senator, that when you see such obstinance, you know, the human dimension you mentioned, when you see the disconnect from that, from the simple humanity of the situation like this and so many other--hundreds, thousands of other cases exactly like the Burns family, do you want to ask the folks who are opposing you here, like, you know, have you ever been sick? Have you ever thought about how much worrying about paying would make it more difficult to get better?

WHITEHOUSE: Yes. And I think one of the things that we‘ve tried to do on the Senate floor is bring these personal stories forward to the American public, because this is not--this health care fight is not a fight about concepts. It‘s not about ideologies. It‘s a fight about families who think they have coverage, then there‘s a hole. And they lose everything that they‘ve ever fought for.

It‘s a fight about people who think they have coverage and lose it. And then they don‘t go to the doctors to visit and they missed that critical diagnosis and their disease takes them on a deadly path because they didn‘t get diagnose in time. I mean, these things happen over and over and over again, and the human cost of our present health care system simply has to be brought home over and over and over again against the propaganda.

OLBERMANN: Well, Senator, I congratulate you on your restraint and not, you know, slamming your head against one of those marble doors behind you when you deal with this in this kind of intensity--as always, my compliments and my thanks to your great efforts on this. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the judiciary committee--thank you, again, sir.

WHITEHOUSE: Thank you, Keith.

OLBERMANN: Tonight, the White House opens a second front in the push to rescue journalism from that hostage drama over there at FOX--when COUNTDOWN continues.

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