President Donald Trump (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) - President Donald Trump said Friday now that the House’s Obamacare repeal and replace bill has been pulled because it lacked the Republican votes needed for passage, Obamacare will “explode,” and when it does, he’s open to working with Democrats to get “a real health care bill.”
“This year should be much worse for Obamacare,” Trump said, adding that when Obamacare explodes, it would be”very good” if the Democrats worked with the Republicans to get “a real health care bill.”
“I’d be totally open to it, and I think that’s going to happen,” Trump said.
The president said the losers are Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), “because now they own Obamacare.”
“They own it 100 percent own it, and this is not a Republican health care. This is not anything but a Democrat health care, and they have Obamacare for a little while longer until it ceases to exist, which it will sometime in the near future, and just remember, this is not our bill. This is their bill. When they all become civilized and get together and try to work out a great health care bill for the people of this country, we’re open to it. We’re totally open to it,” he said.
“We were very close. It was a very, very tight margin,” Trump said in explaining why there wasn’t enough Republican votes to pass the House repeal and replace bill. “We had no Democrat support. We had no votes from the Democrats. They weren’t going to give us a single vote, so it’s a very difficult thing to do.
“I’ve been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do politically speaking is let Obamacare explode,” Trump said, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Trump said Obamacare is “exploding right now,” and he pointed to states like Tennessee which has “lost half of their state in terms of an insurer.”
“They have no insurer, and that’s happening to many other places. I was in Kentucky the other day, and similar things are happening. So Obamacare is exploding. With no Democrat support, we couldn’t quite get there. We’re just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed,” Trump said.
The president said people didn’t realize how good the American Health Care Act was, “because they were viewing phase one, but when you add phase two, which was mostly the signings of Secretary Price who’s behind me, and you add phase three, which I think we would have gotten, it became a great bill.”
“Premiums would have gone down, and it would have been very stable. It would have been very strong, but that’s okay, but we’re very, very close, and again, I think what will happen is, Obamacare unfortunately will explode,” the president said.
“It’s going to have a very bad year. Last year, you had over 100 percent increases in various places. In Arizona, I understand it’s going up very rapidly again like it did last year. Last year, it was 116 percent. Many places, 50, 60, 70 percent. I guess it averaged whatever the average was very, very high,” he said.
The president said in the meantime, he plans to work on tax reform.