Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appeared on MSNBC last night with Rachel Maddow and vigorously defended the healthcare reform bill that Republicans are intent on repealing. Also when asked, Pelosi agreed that any Republicans in Congress advocating repeal should in fact reject their own government provided health insurance.

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When Maddow pressed Pelosi about her defensive strategy against Republicans, Pelosi insisted that making the case to Americans that the reform bill has many benefits and Republicans are trying to “sabotage” them should work. Maddow smartly questioned whether “the effort to sort of take a second stab at selling the virtues of the bill to the public, does that reflect a failure to have done that effectively during the initial debate?” Pelosi said Democrats in the House did not fail in any way, implying that Democrats elsewhere may have dropped that ball.

Maddow and Pelosi agreed that much opposition to the bill actually reflects people who feel the bill didn’t go far enough without having a public option. Yet regardless, Pelosi does not feel this past election was about

healthcare reform and instead was about jobs, since “it’s hard to talk about health reform if people don’t have jobs.” Pelosi also declared “if we had not past healthcare reform we may have lost more seats for being ineffective.”

Pelosi may be right, if the Democrats did not pass healthcare reform, and instead did nothing, they likely would have lost even more seats. However, if Pelosi now admits that when unemployment is high, jobs should be their number one focus, then maybe if Democrats had listened to that advice and took action on jobs last year instead of healthcare, they would not have lost any seats?

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:
Tags: Healthcare, MSNBC, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow