and john chafee in those days was not the same as we know today. he lost the governorship and the senator ship, and he had the misfortune of being secretary of the navy in rhode island when they closed all the bases. at that time, i was man of the year and all that stuff. i could have had the nomination very easily. but after the 1980 election a funny story. i had gone out to meet with ronald reagan in california. when i met with him the fellow who took me was john sears, his campaign guy. they got rid of him after the iowa caucuses. but reagan was sitting there with mike deaver in a wilshire boulevard office and ronald reagan looked old, older than when he became president. but he was sitting there and i will never forget, because he was a conservative kind of guy and i wasn't. we were talking and he said what you see is what you get. you know, and then i went left and i said to john, what happens if a guy like me wins or loses? what can i expect? he said you could get this or that, ambassadorship, so i lost the election. i went down in january to

i want to say to our republican friends, you came up with a good idea in 1993 introduced by john chafee, the senator from rhode island and cosponsored by 23 republicans, an alternative to hillary care in 1993. republicans got the ideas from the heritage foundation. they turned out to be pretty good ideas. and they include, one, every state would have an exchange. people couldn't get health care, they could buy hair health care coverage as -- they could buy their health care coverage as part of the exchange. the idea from chafee and others was a tax credit to buy down the cost of health insurance, buy down the cost of coverage for lower-income people. when their income reached a certain level the tax credit went away. that was in the 1993. individual mandate, said basically folks, you've got to get coverage and there's going to be a fine, you have to pay a fine if you don't. you can't make people get coverage but the idea was to make people get coverage. the employer mandate was the fourth concept. the fourth concept said employers with a certain size, 50 or 100 employees, eventually you