HUGH HEWITT, HOST: Joined now by Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Senator Rubio, welcome back, always a pleasure to speak with you.



SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R-FL): My pleasure. Thanks for having me back.



HEWITT: Some of your Senate Democratic colleagues have figured out that Obamacare is a disaster, and they want to fix it with some patches. Should Senate Republicans help Senators Landrieu, Pryor and Hagan save their seats by signing onto a short-term fix?



RUBIO: You know, I don’t think their solutions are even a short-term fix. You know, I think what’s becoming apparent every day increasingly, and tragically in the lives of many Americans, is the impact this is having on real people, and how this bill really can’t be saved. I mean, at the end of the day, the system was never going to work, and it’s certainly not going to work now. And our biggest regret at this point needs to be how disruptive this is to the American economy and to the aspirations of people that are just trying to get ahead.



HEWITT: Senator Landrieu just said on CNN earlier this afternoon, “I have absolutely nothing to be defensive about.” Do you agree with that?



RUBIO: Well, I don’t. I mean, I think anyone who voted for it and has supported it ever since has a lot to answer for. You know, it was always known from the beginning, the resistance to this was not a resistance to allowing more people to have health insurance. I think that’s the ideal. I think the problem is that their solution to all this, every problem from health insurance to the weather, is some massive federal government intervention into our economy. And that’s exactly what Obamacare is. It’s a massive intervention into something that represents about a sixth of our total economy, and impacts every single American. So you have millions and millions of people who had health insurance that they were happy with, and in an effort to help those who do not have health insurance, they’ve basically negatively impacted everyone.



HEWITT: Now this is a tough, tough problem, because these same Democratic Senators who want to do a fix, they were part of the no negotiations extremism caucus just six weeks ago. Can Republicans sit back and say no negotiations? Or do they have to follow sort of Ron Johnson into the room and try and resurrect something here?



RUBIO: Well, look, we get calls and emails every day from people that are being badly hurt by this. And if there’s something we can do to help them in the short term, we should explore that. But by no means should we be exploring ways to try to fix this law, because it’s not fixable. It’s basically like trying to run to the Titanic and trying to plug holes with Crazy Glue. I mean, you’re not going to be able to do it. This is just taking on way too much water. This program was never designed to work. From the very beginning, it was never going to work. And I’m starting to get the sense that perhaps all of this is now just a big excuse to come back and some point and say you see, this is why we need a single payer system, which some Democrats actually either secretly want, and some of them openly want.