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Cotton Says Congress Has to Revisit Obamacare

March 26, 2017

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told CBS host John Dickerson on Sunday that he believes Congress must revisit Obamacare to address growing problems with the health care system.

Dickerson asked Cotton whether President Donald Trump's comments from Friday were a "nervous-making thing" to hear.

"As you know, I have been saying for years that the best thing is to let Obamacare explode, and then go make a deal with the Democrats and have one unified deal. And they will come to us. We won’t have to come to them after Obamacare explodes,"  Trump told the Washington Post.

Cotton admitted that some of his constituents were helped by former President Barack Obama's health care law, but then emphasized how many more people were hurt by it.

"I know that some people were helped by Obamacare. There's no doubt about that. But many more were hurt by it," Cotton said. "Those are the people we need to keep in mind when we're trying to solve the problems for people who benefited from Obamacare, without imposing all the costs that Obamacare did."

"We don't have a choice to revisit or not revisit it. We have to revisit it," Cotton added.

Cotton had previously opposed the Republican proposal, the American Health Care Act, on Twitter, saying that it would not pass the Senate without "major changes."

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) pulled the health care bill from the floor on Friday afternoon after it was determined that Republicans did not have enough votes to pass the bill.