Overtime - Episode #345 (Originally aired 3/6/15)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

All right, we're back on.

David Ochterod, what can we expect the president to accomplish in his last years, well, now almost months in office?

Yes, well, I think he's going to move forward on climate change.

Huge,

huge initiative.

I think that he's going to work on these issues that go to middle-class security, which is, in his view, I think in most people's view, the biggest issue of our time.

How do you build an economy in which people can

actually work and get ahead?

We need to work on climate change.

Inhoff had a snowball in his hand the other day.

Yes.

Plainly, that refutes all the science.

Yes.

He had a snowball in his hand.

On the floor.

I had a reporter say to me, why is he working on this?

It's at the bottom of the MBC Wall Street Journal poll.

I got a young granddaughter.

I'm thinking, I'm going to tell her from the grave at the end of this century, hey, we could have worked on this problem, but the NBC Wall Street Journal poll was.

Well said.

Matt, what can you tell us about the book you're working on about Eric Garner?

Eric Garner, the New York man who was choked by the police for selling loose cigarettes.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's all the same issues we were talking about before.

I mean, the Eric Garner case was,

I think, it really exemplified everything that's wrong with community policing in this country.

And it's a fascinating story about race and why people hate each other in this country.

And

so I'm going to spend a year working on it.

Okay.

Genevieve, what would a Republican health care bill look like?

Well, I think there's a lot of different options out there right now.

I would encourage people to go to heritage.org, where I work, if you want to see a whole host of plans.

But I think one of the first things that we could do is, especially if this court case goes the way that it could, which means a lot of people that currently have health care that can no longer, won't be able to get the subsidies, are going to need health care.

And I think states need to be taking action right now, not waiting for the Supreme Court to come down to say, look, we're going to do two things.

We're going to make sure that these people are taken care of.

They can either go back to plans that they had before that they lost,

or that we can create plans that basically are not as expensive because we don't have to have all the mandates that Obamacare required, which makes a lot of plans expensive.

And third, I think states ought to not compete, but people who live in, let's say California wants to mandate, I don't know, hair transplants and it's part of health care.

Let's just say they do.

That's fine in California.

People.

You better shut it, Dave.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

No.

I'm sitting here.

He doesn't care.

I'm trying to come up with something that most people might think is not necessary in health care, but some people might want it in their plan.

But that's going to make it more expensive, right?

If it's mandated.

But let's say that somebody in Arizona says, look, we're going to have a plan that's much more narrowly focused.

It just really covers the very basic things.

The Arizona plan is going to be cheaper.

People in California ought to be able to buy a health plan in Arizona.

People in Arizona ought to be able to buy a health plan in Massachusetts.

They should have more choice.

And I think if we're looking for freedom and choice in health care and giving people options, that's a good way to go.

Dave, what do you say to that?

I say,

we've cut the uninsured down by 25%.

You say people can go back to their plans.

These people didn't have plans.

That's why they needed health care.

Can I give a rebuttal?

Well.

They had the emergency room.

That's a plan.

Yes.

Yeah, but now what most of them have,

we have 8.4 million or 8.5 million folks signed up in the exchange through like September of last year.

About 7.5 million, I think it's 7.4 million of those folks didn't get private insurance.

They're on Medicaid.

Well, Medicaid is not a great deal.

It's a great deal if you had nothing before, isn't it?

You know, Bill, if you're giving people, just because you give somebody a Medicaid card says, oh, now you have health care.

If fewer and fewer doctors are taking Medicaid, which is a problem,

certainly in a lot of more crowded areas, then yeah, you have a card, but you can't get into the doctor, and that's not good health care.

I agree.

It's a mess.

This is why we should just have a single-payer system, like every other big boy country has.

Will the murder of a prominent Russian opposition leader this week spark any international response against Putin?

Well, first of all, he's not terribly prominent.

I mean, I lived in Russia for 10 years.

Boris Nemsov, he was really,

not terribly relevant in modern Russian politics.

Putin just didn't like it personally.

You think Putin did it?

Is he here?

Well, the gunman was seen leaving the crime shirtless riding a bear.

Right.

Are you saying that

you have no doubt in your mind that it is.

Well, it's 100 yards from the Kremlin and, you know, I mean, who else is going to do an organized hit, you know, on that bridge right next to the Kremlin?

I think it's pretty odd.

There's not that many other suspects.

And he's running the investigations.

Right, yeah,

he'll have answers.

That's just saying.

Yes, he'll have answers.

And you think it was just because he could do it, he wasn't even really that much of a threat?

Well, people here in the United States,

they overthink it, and they say, well, it really wasn't in his best interest.

They should have just left him alive.

The optics are bad of leaving him alive.

They don't think about the optics of this stuff.

They just don't like the guy, and they whacked him.

That's really the point.

Putin seems really concerned about optics.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we tend to think like everybody thinks like us, and they don't.

But, I mean, Putin is a European problem, isn't it?

I mean, I don't know why.

He's a bad actor on the

stage.

There's lots of them.

Do we have to get involved everywhere?

Why can't people clean up their own neighborhoods?

Why can't...

Would love it if they would.

Would love it if many of them would.

Well, so what?

Putin is not sponsoring terrorism over here.

I mean, you can kind of make the case against ISIS that way, that they might sponsor terrorism here.

But Putin's not doing that.

So what do we give a shit about Crimea?

It's not our problem.

Yeah, the Russians definitely see NATO's incursion into that part of the world

as clearly

an intrusion

that they feel that they were promised during the 80s that NATO would disintegrate when the Soviet Union collapsed.

They take that stuff very seriously, They see it as aggressive on our part, not on Putin's part.

Okay.

Genevieve, what do you make of the challenges to Speaker Boehner from his own party?

Will there be a coup?

I think the biggest challenge already occurred when they had the run.

And

he won overwhelmingly, but I think people forget that the fact that it 20, so I forgot what the exact total was, but the fact that he had as many as he did vote against him was a big statement.

But look, I think the challenge for Boehner is going to be, and Mitch McConnell, over the next two years, I mean, you have a president who doesn't want to be a lame duck president, quite frankly.

And while I don't like a lot of his policies and agree with a lot of his politics, I do admire he's willing to put the pedal to the metal and push as much of his agenda through as he possibly can.

And I don't...

His agenda?

Well, I mean, what his view of the pressure is.

In fact, his agenda is always kind of counter to the Tea Party agenda.

It seems like there's a pattern over there.

Well, no, I mean, the president's wanting to push his agenda.

I'm saying he's committed to his agenda and doing whatever it takes to get it through, some of which I think is not constitutional at times.

But nonetheless, he's willing to push it.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have not shown at this point that they're willing to do the same on their side.

And so I think the next two years, I think Republicans better be concerned about

2016 and getting so disgruntled with who's there that they're just focusing on who's running next while the president's still being president.

You know what I think is they're the dog that caught the car.

They wanted to run the Congress.

Now they're running the Congress and the tailor's bagging the dog.

Right.

And they don't know what to do about it.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, audience.

We will see you all next week, I hope.

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