Republicans will have difficulty passing replacement legislation for Obamacare because some House conservatives will reject it if includes any part of the original legislation, Ohio Gov. John Kasich told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“The fact of the matter is you can’t just repeal without repealing and replacing at the same time,” Kasich said. “It just becomes a political impossibility and there’s no reason to do it any other way than that.”
He emphasized that those conservatives who say “just get rid of the whole thing” is unacceptable “when you have 20 million people or 700,000 people in my state, because where do the mentally ill go, where do the drug addicts go?”
Kasich said “I’m going to stand up for the people that wouldn’t have the coverage if they don’t get this thing right. And I happen to believe that the best way to get this… right over time is for actually both parties to work together. I know that’s considered an impossibility now, but what’s at stake is not some political thing. What’s at stake here are 20 million Americans.”
Kasich, who ran against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, met with the president on Friday and said he was pleased that Trump “responded very positively to a number of the ideas” he presented.
The Ohio governor said he also agreed with Trump that intelligence leaks are not acceptable, insisting that “people take an oath to be secret in the Intelligence Committee” and “when people leak there, they need to really be held accountable.”
Kasich lamented not only that bipartisanship is virtually nonexistent, but that people are living in a silo, because they are “only consuming news that they happen to agree with.”
He insisted that he wished Trump well, saying “I’m on a plane and he’s the pilot. And, you know, the fact is, I want the pilot to be successful. But you know what, every once in a while… you need to yell into the cockpit.”
Kasich said that he had also expressed criticism when he disagreed with other Republican presidents.
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