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WILSON: On compromise, you've heard criticism from both sides. Tell me your thinking about compromise -- when it's necessary, when -- just the way you've thought about it this year -- to achieved what you've achieved.

OBAMA: Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the reality of compromise then in the health care bill. If you look back at the commitments I made during the campaign and the guidelines that I set forward for what I wanted to see in the health care bill, when I made my speech to the Joint Session on September 9, we got 95 percent of what we called for. We said we wanted to make sure we covered 30 million Americans who don't have coverage -- that's in both the House and the Senate bills. We said we wanted to end insurance company abuses, like people with preexisting conditions not being able to get coverage, or sky high out of pocket expenses -- those robust reforms.

Essentially, a patient's bill of rights on steroids is embodied in this bill. We said that we wanted to help small businesses provide health insurance for their workers. Those provisions are in this bill. I said that it had to be deficit neutral. It's not just deficit neutral, according to the CBO, it actually reduces the deficit over the next 20 years by over a trillion dollars. Every serious economist out there says there's not an idea about getting more bang for our health care dollars that has been followed out there that is not embodied in this bill.

So, every single criteria for reform that I put forward is in this bill. It is true that that the Senate version does not have a public option and that has become a source of ideological contention between the left and the right, but I didn't campaign on a public option. I think it is a good idea but as I said on that speech on September 9, it just one small element of a broader reform effort.

So we don't feel that the core elements to help the American people that I campaigned on ¿ and that we've been fighting for all year -- have been compromised in any significant way. Do these pieces of legislation have exactly everything that I'd want? Of course not. But they have the things that are necessary to reduce costs for businesses, families and the government. So the way I generally think about compromise has been that I start with a set of core principles about what it is we're trying to achieve. We work with House and Senate members -- and there are some red lines that can't be crossed from our perspective -- and there are other areas where there are legitimate debates about how to achieve those goals. If someone can show me a different way of getting things done that accomplishes that endpoint, I'm happy to consider those.

But when it comes to health care reform, as the major example, I'm not just grudgingly supporting that bill. I am very enthusiastic about what we've achieved and I would challenge anybody to take a look at what I campaigned on and what we started with at the beginning of the year to find any significant gap from what I said then and hat we've achieved. In fact, I am pleasantly surprised about how well the House and Senate have performed given the complexities of this issue, and the fact that the insurance industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars opposing this, that we've seen legislation that conforms as much to our core principles as I had hoped.