Obama’s Interview: Most Important Quotes On Healthcare.gov And NSA

President Obama sat down for an extended interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd about the epic failure of the healthcare website and National Security Agency spying. The video is embedded below. I’ll get right to the quotes and add context:

– “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” Obama was referring to the hundreds of thousands of people who are receiving health insurance cancellations from plans that do not conform to rules under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a “Obamacare”).

–“Kathleen Sebelius doesn’t write code, she wasn’t our IT person”, on the Secretary of Health and Human Services, related to ongoing issues with Healthcare.gov, the new federal healthcare insurance e-commerce website.

–“In some ways, the technology and the budget and the capacity have outstripped the constraints, and we’ve got to rebuild those,” on the reach of National Security Agency spying.

–“This idea, that somehow every president is looking at the raw intelligence and figuring out what sources those are, is just not the case,” on whether he knew that the National Security Agency was monitoring the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He would not give a straight answer on whether he knew the NSA was monitoring her calls.

–“When it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained to a bunch of federal procurement rules,” on how federal contracting rules makes the government far less efficient than his tech-savvy campaign. Notably he says he wants to review federal procurement for all of the federal government.

There you have it folks. Convinced?