Kaine to GOP: Don't rush over a cliff on Obamacare
Republicans are preparing to drive American healthcare off a cliff by repealing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Tim Kaine said Thursday morning, and if they do, they should not plan on getting help from Democrats to help pick up the pieces down the road.
Instead, Kaine said, the time to fix the healthcare legislation is now.
“Look, can this law be improved? Can the health care system be improved? Sure it can and we ought to be working together to do that,” the former Democratic vice presidential nominee said on CNN’s “New Day,” recalling Congressional Democrats’ meeting Wednesday with President Barack Obama. “But if they force through a partisan repeal vote and rush into a repeal that strips health insurance away from 30 million Americans and then say ‘oh now that we have repealed please help us fix the mess that we made,’ he said don't bail them out of their own problem.”
Kaine said the GOP’s plan, which could allow time for the full formulation of a replacement plan by sunsetting Obamacare in a few years, is akin to “saying we’re going to jump off a cliff and we'll figure out how to land later.”
With Congressional Republicans already beginning the process of repealing the controversial law, both parties huddled on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for strategy sessions. Obama met with Democrats, who seem poised to pin any pain felt by Americans as a result of the repeal and replacement process onto Republicans. The GOP, for its part, met with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and emerged eager to remind Americans that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who brought about the program and its subsequent struggles.
President-elect Donald Trump, too, has weighed in, writing on Twitter Thursday morning that “the Democrats, lead [sic] by head clown Chuck Schumer, know how bad ObamaCare is and what a mess they are in. Instead of working to fix it, they do the typical political thing and BLAME.” That followed a post from him on Wednesday, when he wrote that “Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster.”