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In a “Meet the Press” interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker that aired Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said…
In one “Meet the press” In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker that aired Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump was highly critical of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who helped defeat a 2017 effort in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act to pull.
McCain and two other Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — joined Democrats and independents in a 51-49 vote against legislation aimed at dismantling the health care law passed in 2010 during Gov. Barack Obama.
“They did us a great disservice because we would have had great health – Obamacare is crappy health care,” Trump told NBC. “It’s very expensive health care for the people. It is also expensive for the country, but also for the people. It’s bad health care. When John McCain put his thumbs down after a decade of saying he wants to repeal and replace, okay, and when he came out he put his now famous thumbs down and became a hero on the left, let me just tell you that. If we find something better, I’d love to do it.”
To look back on 2017, McCain voted against a proposal “meager withdrawal” during Trump’s presidency. The intention was to move the Senate legislation into negotiations with the House to form a final bill that both chambers could pass.
The House of Representatives legislation, the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act of 2017, faced challenges because the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would increase the number of uninsured people by 32 million by 2026.
Overall, critics said the bill’s tax cuts would help wealthy Americans, but overall the plan would be bad news for tax break recipients who were older, sicker and poorer.
Prior to the “meager withdrawal” In an attempt by the House of Representatives, the bill was rejected in the Senate by a vote of 55 to 45. Then as now, no specific replacement plan for Obamacare had clear support.
In his “Meet the press” In the interview, Trump veered away from saying Obamacare is worthless and instead took credit for saving it after the 2017 Senate vote.
“And I had to make a decision regarding health care and human services.” he said. “I had to make a big decision. Do I make it as good as we can make it or do I let it rot? And a lot of political people said, ‘Let it rot and let it be a failure.’ I said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do.’ And I had very good people in the medical field who dealt with that. And I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘We really have an obligation to make it the best it can be,’ and we did that. We made it the best we could. Instead of making it bad, where everyone would call for its repeal, I made it so that it works.”
As a presidential candidate, Trump said yes in September “concepts of a plan” for the future of healthcare. On ‘Meet the press’ it was more of the same.
‘The largest healthcare companies are looking at it’ he said. “We have doctors who are always looking. Because Obamacare stinks. It’s bad. There are better answers. If we come up with a better answer, I would take that answer to the Democrats and everyone else and do something about it. But until we get that or until they can approve it – but we’re not going to go through with the big deal. I’m the one who saved Obamacare, I’ll say. And I did the right thing.”
Summarizing Trump’s positions is a challenge, but here goes:
The president-elect believes Obamacare is bad, but takes credit for keeping it in place after a 2017 repeal attempt failed. He resents those who thwarted the repeal, even though no popular replacement plan was visible. More than seven years later, he still wants something better, but we’ll have to see what that will be.
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