House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer argued Wednesday that President-elect Trump has “no concept” of how difficult it will be to replace Obamacare if he gets his wish and Republicans repeal the healthcare law after he assumes office.
The Maryland Democrat told reporters just after Trump’s first news conference since becoming president-elect, during which he called for the near simultaneous replacement of the healthcare law upon repeal, that Trump inaccurately assumes the repeal and replacement will happen quickly.
“I think he has no concept of how difficult this task will be. I don’t think he had any concept during the election,” Hoyer said, adding that he did not watch Trump’s press conference. “He tends to simply say things, conclusionary statements that he believes will happen because he says they will happen.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be quick, and I certainly don’t think it’s going to be easy,” Hoyer added.
“The presumption that they’re going to do it in the short term, as President-elect Trump apparently continues to assert and that the Republicans asserted regularly over the last six years, is wrong,” Hoyer said. “I think the proof of that is … that Republicans have been lamenting the adoption of the Affordable Care Act and have come up with no replacement over the last 84 months. So I don’t expect them to come up with one that’s effective or that the members of Congress or the American people are going to have a degree of confidence in.”
He went on to predict that the replacement of the ACA would cause “chaos.” The former majority leader also batted down chatter that Democrats could help Republicans in replacing the healthcare law if it is ultimately repealed, repeatedly declining to entertain the “hypothetical” possibility, maintaining that Democrats stand united and are willing to improve parts of the law.
When asked a separate hypothetical about the possibility that Republicans could repeal the law but keep revenue streams and taxes intact, Hoyer said they would be “hypocrites” if they did so.
In his highly-anticipated press conference, Trump insisted that Republicans could allow the law to fall by the wayside and benefit politically, but that it would take too long and that repealing and replacing the law is the best thing to do.
“Frankly, we could sit back — and it was a thought from a political standpoint, but it wouldn’t be fair to the people,” Trump said. “We could sit back and wait and watch and criticize, and we could be a Chuck Schumer and criticize it and people would come, they would come begging us, ‘Please we have to do something about Obamacare.’ We don’t want to own it. We don’t want to own it politically. They own it right now. So the easiest thing would be to let it implode in ’17 and believe me we’d get pretty much whatever we wanted, but it would take a long time.”
“Obamacare is the Democrats’ problem,” Trump said. “We are going to take the problem off the shelves for them. We are doing them a tremendous service by doing it. We could sit back and let them hang with it. We are doing the Democrats a great service.”
