After meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he does not believe the House proposal to repeal and replace Obamacare has enough votes to pass.
In an interview with Erin Burnett on CNN’s “OutFront,” the Congressman urged his colleagues to go back to the drawing board and “do the right thing.”
Jordan said he had a “good meeting” with the President and that “this is the start of the negotiations,” but cautioned, “I don’t think there’s the votes for this legislation.”
The Congressman, a founding member of the influential House Freedom Caucus, said “we want to help the President do what we told the voters we were going to do. We told them we would repeal Obamacare.”
“This bill that the House leadership has brought forward is not that,” Jordan said. “It says we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but we’re going to keep Medicaid expansion and we’re going to extend it. It says we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but we’re going to keep some of the tax increases. That’s not what we told the voters we were going to do. Let’s repeal it, let’s repeal it all.”
“Let’s do the right thing and let’s put together the right kind of legislation that accomplishes what we all told the voters we were going to do,” he added.
Jordan also responded to a CNN story about Alondra Toribio, a 24-year-old Kentucky woman who said she enrolled in the Medicaid expansion through Obamacare because she would only have $100 to spare each week if she used her employer-based healthcare.
Asked if it was acceptable that Toribio could lose her coverage under the Republican replacement plan, Jordan said he didn’t “define success as putting more people on government health care, I define success as bringing back affordable insurance, lowering the cost of health care, so working class families, middle class families and individuals like you just had the clip on can actually afford to buy a policy that fits their need.”
“That is what we’ve lost,” he added. “That’s what happened under Obamacare.”
Jordan urged his fellow lawmakers to support an Obamacare repeal bill from 2015 that he reintroduced on Wednesday.