GOP Sen Toomey: Obamacare Repeal Difficult Because We Didn’t Expect Trump to Win

Wednesday on WHTM in Harrisburg, PA at a televised town hall, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) said he and “most” of his colleagues in the Senate did not expect President Donald Trump to win the election, so they did not have an Obamacare repeal and replace bill ready.

Toomey said, “You see how difficult it is to get a Republican consensus until the election last fall, which surprised me. I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t. So we didn’t expect to be in this situation. Given how difficult it is to get to a consensus, it is hard to force that until there was a need to. So that’s what we have been working on. I will also say there’s been a new wrinkle in this. The early version, the early idea of how we would handle this difficult challenge was to pass a repeal bill that would be pretty much a clean repeal, then stabilize the individual market and set the repeal effective several years hence. And then have the opportunity to work out the reforms. That has been collapsed now in a shorter time frame.”

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