kavita patell. she worked on the department. back to that hearing that's under way on capitol hill, the nomination of rod rosenstein ambassador the deputy attorney general, i want to bring in nbc's capitol hill correspondent kase ooe hunt. kasie, in the mix of all of these things that you're involved in, including a question you just asked about health care, i want to take you back to this. who is rod rosenstein? most americans wouldn't have been able to name the deputy attorney general for a long time. why is this so important? >> yes, and forgive me, we're still in the room where the press conference about health care just took place. rod rosenstein is the attorney for the eastern district of maryland, and you're right, you would not necessarily have any idea who the deputy attorney general might be, but it's become so important because of t this investigation that's going on into russian meddling into the election and tying between the trump campaign and russians during the course of the election. and democrats have been call

kavita, you've watched the changes to try and do more, it didn't seem to change the whip count on how this is going to go. what's your sense of the best thing to happen right now? >> the best thing -- if you're a republican the best thing to happen would be you can at least say to people, look, this is just to get us through the house, we're going to still be working on this, it's a long process. they still have to get it through the senate side and then committee and you'll continue to work on this. if you're a democrat you're hoping that you're still nine votes short and that this fails and that we still have the affordable care act as pretty much the law of the land. >> which is what president trump has said will happen. by the way, this is not about the changes made last night, it's about the last set of changes. interesting result. it shows basically no change in the number of people who will have coverage versus the first draft but less of an impact on the deficit. in fact, less of a reduction in the deficit. in the original bill, $337 billion deficit reduction in this new bill,

. >>> kavita, why are health care costs twice as much in the u.s.to other developed countries and when you look at life expectancy, it's higher elsewhere? >> you've brought this up, ali, and it's true. when you look at our per capita spending compared to health outcomes, america does just about kind of at the bottom of the eu chart and, in many cases, other third third countries are doing better than we are. that comes down to three reasons. number one, we have no checks and balances on what we're paying for. when you and i go to purchase anything else, we have a sense of how good that product is. we have very little insight into whether the doctor that we're seeing is a good doctor or a bad doctor. second, we actually have been burying the brunt of the costs for the world around drug prices, around the costs we pay for images, lab tests, hospital beds, you name it. so a lot of economists like to say it's the prices, stupid. and that's a lot of what we're paying for in health care. >> thank you both for your time. i appreciate it. we'll talk to you