President-elect Donald Trump demanded on Tuesday that Congress immediately repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass another health law quickly. His stance would give Republicans only weeks to draft a replacement for a health law that took nearly two years to shape.
"We have to get to business," Trump told The New York Times in a telephone interview. "Obamacare has been a catastrophic event."
Trump appeared to be unclear both about the timing of already scheduled votes in Congress and about the difficulty of his demand — a repeal vote "probably some time next week" and a replacement "very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter."
[Alaska Sen. Murkowski among Republicans pushing for more time to repeal Obamacare]
But he was clear on one point: Plans by congressional Republicans to repeal the health law now, then take years to create and implement a replacement law are unacceptable to the incoming president.
Republican leaders have made the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement a top priority. They hope that the Senate will vote on Thursday and the House will vote on Friday to approve parliamentary language created to protect repeal legislation from a filibuster in the Senate.
House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin set out a similar timetable Tuesday, saying that a bill to repeal the health care law would include some legislation to replace aspects of it, though Republicans have yet to agree on the details of their alternative.
"It is our goal to bring it all together concurrently," Ryan said.
But those ambitions will be difficult to achieve and will almost certainly require Democratic cooperation. Until now, Republicans could vote to repeal Obama's health law with no fear that they would have to live with the political consequences of scuttling a law that provides health care for 20 million Americans and protects millions more from discrimination for pre-existing medical conditions, ends lifetime caps on insurance coverage and allows children to remain on their parents' insurance policies until age 26.
Five Senate Republicans have pressed to delay the deadline for committees to produce repeal legislation until March and several House Republicans are also demanding that the pace slow down.
"In an ideal situation, we would repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously, but we need to make sure that we have at least a detailed framework that tells the American people what direction we're headed," said one of those five Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.