President Obama goaded Republicans into creating a replacement plan for Obamacare as the GOP aims to start next week on drafting legislation to dismantle his signature domestic achievement.
“If you can put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what Obamacare is doing, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with your plan,” Obama said during an interview with news site Vox on Friday. “But I want to see it first.”
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Obama has repeatedly slammed Republican efforts this week to repeal the law but leave it intact for a few years while a replacement is created.
Obama noted that repealing the healthcare law is going to be more difficult than the GOP thinks it would be.
“It is a much more complicated process to repeal this law than I think it was being presented on the campaign trail, as my Republican friends are discovering,” he said.
A handful of Republican senators have come out against repealing Obamacare without a replacement plan in place. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against a procedural vote on a budget resolution that would have started Obamacare repeal efforts.
The Senate aims to have a final vote next week on the budget resolution, which kickstarts Obamacare repeal by using the procedural tool reconciliation. That would enable the Senate to repeal the law via a simple majority vote rather than the 60 votes needed to bypass a filibuster.
Obama criticized the timetable for voting on repeal.
“There is no explanation for why you would try to do this before the new president gets inaugurated,” he said. “Republicans will own the problems with the health system if they choose to repeal it.”
