Alan Grayson on Real Time

From Crooks and Liars:

From Real Time with Bill Maher Oct. 16, 2009.

Alan Grayson did a great job on Bill Maher’s show and countered some of Bill’s nonsense—like him citing a study that he doesn’t source—that the problem with our health care system’s costs are too many doctors just wanting to prescribe unneeded drugs, unneeded tests and unneeded surgeries. Grayson disagrees with Maher and says that our real problem is the amount of money the insurance companies are taking off the top and making money from denying care.

Grayson responds by saying “One person’s unnecessary test is another person’s life saving test. You can’t get around that”. He reminded Maher that the Bush administration skewed a study to show what they wanted it to show when it came to the amount of money trial lawyers are adding to the total cost of health care in the United States and he gets Maher to concede that “studies can say anything”.

When asked if he was disappointed in the President and how he’s “thrown in with these corporatist Democrats” and Maher says he knows Grayson is not one of them Grayson likens himself to Huey Long and says “You’ve got to put some jam on the bottom shelf where the little man can reach it”.

Grayson defends President Obama and says reads things a little differently and he thinks Obama is trying not to repeat Bill Clinton’s mistakes on getting health care reform passed.

Grayson says “Instead he’s letting Congress decide how to do things and it’s going way too slow. There’s a 122 Americans who die every single day because they don’t have health care. And I’ve been saying that for weeks. We’ve got to pick up the pace. We’ve got to save those lives. But I understand what the President’s doing and you know, people attack him and he turns the other cheek like any good Muslim would do”.

When Maher says his comment is going to be played on Fox News, Grayson says they have no sense of humor. Maher says it will be used as an attack ad against him and Grayson says they’ve got plenty of material already, so he's not too worried about it.

Grayson finished up the interview by saying we should be out of Afghanistan already and that he didn’t support a “war tax” but would be against anyone sending troops anywhere if we don’t have a good reason to be there.