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Schumer: ‘Bipartisan Medicine’ Is Needed To Fix Health Care

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined at right by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., criticizes the Republican health care bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 11, 2017. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he will unveil their revised health care bill Thursday and begin voting on it next week.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined at right by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., criticizes the Republican health care bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 11, 2017. Se... Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined at right by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., criticizes the Republican health care bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 11, 2017. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he will unveil their revised health care bill Thursday and begin voting on it next week. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) MORE LESS
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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.

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  1. Give it up chuck. The GOPers do not want bipartisan anything. McConnell hates the democrats he sees them as just obstructions to be brushed aside.

  2. “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

    Exhibit 1 displaying that the Democrats don’t have an alternative healthcare plan that they will fight for.

    Democrats should be advocating for universal health care, not this wishy-washy “lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health-care system” nonsense. Schumer sounds just like a lying Republican when he talks like that.

    Democrats should start fighting for Universal Coverage and then make the Republicans fight against that.

    “Lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health-care system” won’t get people out to vote. Universal Coverage will.

  3. Forget about it. What the Republicans call bipartisanship, the rest of the world calls date rape.

  4. The worst possibility of all for the GOP: actually having to work with the Dems. Of course Chuck knows it won’t happen, but this lets him control the narrative and call McConnell a loser who’s been left with a circus of manchildren

  5. Yes, as long as the Republicans control the Senate, any bipartisan effort is DOA. Schumer knows this. That’s why it’s so safe to offer cooperation - he knows they’ll never actually take him up on the offer.

    If the purity police think he should instead be shouting about single payer, well, they should primary him and see if the voters really have the stomach for a direct-to-single-payer replacement when we don’t even have a functioning public option. I don’t think they do, but I’ve been wrong before.

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