Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blasted his Republican colleagues’ plan to repeal Obamacare without a replacement, saying the move would be a “disaster” and calling the current GOP Senate health bill “unworkable.”
“It’s time to move one. It’s time to start over. Rather than repeating the same failed partisan process, yet again, Republicans should work together with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health-care system,” Schumer said Tuesday from the Senate floor, slamming majority leader Mitch McConnell for assuming Democrats did not want to work with GOP leaders on a health care compromise. “The majority leader admitted he decided the matter for us when he locked Democrats out of the process at the outset. … Now that their one-party effort largely failed, we hope they will change their tune.”
Schumer’s comments came after the GOP effort to repeal and replace Obamacare unravelled Monday night when two Republican Senators came out as opposed to the plan.
“Make no mistake about it, passing repeal without a replacement would be a disaster. Our health care system would implode, millions would lose coverage,” he said, adding that repealing now and having it go into effect two years later would be worse for American people than the passage of the Republican health care bill that was just rejected.
“It’s like, if our health care system was a patient who came in and needed some medicine. Republicans propose surgery, the operation was a failure. Now Republicans are proposing a second surgery that will surely kill the patient. Medicine is needed, bipartisan medicine, not a second surgery,” he said.
