Top House Democrats are prepared to sit out any process to replace Obamacare, putting the onus on Republicans to find a replacement if the law gets repealed.
Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), the vice chair of the Democratic Caucus, said that Republicans will be forced to go about the replacement process “alone” without Democrats if Republicans repeal Obamacare, the Washington Examiner reported.
“Democrats are ready to work with them if they want to fine tune the parts of the ACA that are not working so well,” Sanchez said. “But if they want to dismantle real progress for working families, then Republicans are going to have to do it alone because we won’t stand there and let it happen.”
Sanchez also said the only way she and other House Democrats would work with Republicans is if the replacement will cover the 20 million people the Affordable Care Act has covered.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) said the Republicans’ stance on Obamacare was like wanting “dessert before eating their vegetables.”
In the Senate, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) echoed those sentiments, saying that Republicans have to come up with a replacement plan first if Democrats expect to work with Republicans at all.
“We’re going to say, ‘let’s see the Republican plan’ because the Republicans, if we put forward a plan first, they’d reject it. The kind of thing[s] we want to do are quite different,” Schumer said. “We want to cover these 20 million [people]. We did already.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that Republicans plan to replace and repeal Obamacare “concurrently,” the Hill reported.
“We are going to use every tool at our disposal, through legislation and regulations, to bring replacement concurrently with repeal so we can save people from this mess,” Ryan said.
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