President Obama talks healthcare tussles and football grudges on Super Bowl Sunday

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President Obama, although rooting for the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl today, allows that the Indianapolis Colts ‘have to be favored.’’

‘I think the Colts probably have to be favored, mainly because they have the best quarterback in history. Peyton Manning is unbelievable,’’ the president said in a pre-game interview Sunday with CBS News. ‘I do have a soft spot in my heart for New Orleans, mainly because of what that town has gone through. ...

Obama confessed that his feelings about today’s match-up could be affected by a grudge he held against the Colts: ‘When my Bears went to the Super Bowl several years ago, it was the Colts that beat them.’’

‘CBS Evening News’ anchor Katie Couric interviewed the president as part of the network’s pre-game coverage of the Super Bowl. The talk was aired starting at 4:30 p.m. EST, a little more than an hour before kickoff.

On a sunny but cold day when Washington was digging out from a couple of feet of snow -- as much as 32 inches at Dulles International Airport -- the president was holding a Super Bowl party at the White House with lawmakers from the home-state teams, Louisiana and Indiana, as well as some injured veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Obama and Couric talked about more than football.

This week, the president said, he was going to start meeting with legislative leaders of both parties about the way forward on healthcare.

‘They’re going to be coming into the White House next week, and what I want them to do is put their ideas on the table,’’ he said.

‘Part of the reason we can’t back off on this,’’ he said, is that major insurers already are increasing premiums. ‘That’s a portrait of the future ... We’re going to have to do something about it. ...

‘What I want to do is look at the Republican ideas that are out there -- how do you guys plan to lower costs. ... How do you intend to ensure that the 30 million people without insurance get it,’’ he said.

Does he wish that he had waited until the economy was stronger before undertaking his healthcare reforms?

‘No,’’ he said. His administration was working on the economic stimulus last year, ‘and, having taken those steps very quickly at the front end, at the beginning of the year, it was also very important for us to start focusing on issues that middle-class families have been struggling with...

‘It was the right thing to be done then,’’ he said. ‘It continues to be the right thing.

‘What is absolutely true is that getting something passed through Congress, with 535 members, is hard,’’ he said. ‘Each legislator, they think they’re doing what’s best for their state or their district. ... What we have to do is make sure it is a much more clear, transparent process.’

The end product, the president said, ‘will benefit millions of people.’

‘I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with an elegant, academically approved approach to healthcare, and it didn’t have any legislative fingerprints on it,’’ the president said. ‘That’s not how it works in our democracy. ... What we have to do is a lot of negotiation. ... Cumulatively, it looks like each individual legislator is looking out for his own. ... My job is to look out for that bigger picture.’’

The president maintained that he was running a more transparent administration than ever, with full disclosure of who was visiting the White House. ‘All these things take time,’’ Obama said. ‘You’re not going to transform a culture in Washington in a year. ... You’ve just got to keep chipping away at it. ‘’

Couric asked about the deficit.

‘The biggest ... most important thing we can do about deficits is to get a health insurance package passed,’’ the president said. ‘If we can start bending the cost curve on healthcare, that’s the biggest thing we can do ... in the long term.’’

The president defended the administration’s handling of accused terrorists and maintained that some can be held in maximum-security prisons -- such as the one that the government wants to purchase from Illinois, the Thomson Correctional Center, to house detainees.

‘It is a virtue of our system that we should be proud of,’’ he said. ‘It’s important for us to recognize that, when we’re dealing with Al Qaeda operatives, they may have national security intelligence that we need,’’ and the approach to handling them is not the same as dealing with a drug dealer. On the proposed trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City, he said, ‘We have not ruled out anything.’’

-- Mark Silva