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Trump: I want Obamacare repealed and replaced within ‘weeks’
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Trump: I want Obamacare repealed and replaced within ‘weeks’

President-elect Donald Trump not only wants the Affordable Care Act repealed immediately, he also wants to see a replacement bill introduced "very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter," putting intense pressure on the Republican-led Congress.

"We have to get to business. Obamacare has been a catastrophic event," Trump, who is just 10 days from taking the oath of office Jan. 20, told the New York Times Tuesday.

While Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) agrees with Trump about replacing Obamacare right after it is repealed and promised Monday to unveil a replacement plan of his own this week, many Republicans are hoping for a wider time gap between repealing and replacing, given the GOP has so far failed to reach consensus about how, exactly, the health care bill should be overhauled.

Trump, however, is gung-ho about fully replacing Obamacare almost immediately after it is scrapped, according to the Times:

He said he would not accept a delay of more than a few weeks before a replacement plan was voted on. “Long to me would be weeks,” he said. “It won’t be repeal and then two years later go in with another plan.” That directly contradicts House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s plans.

Ryan met privately with Trump transition officials Monday to discuss health-care reform and agreed with the president-elect that Obamacare is a disaster and needs to be repealed. However, he wasn't too keen on Trump's replacement plan. Rather than an immediate overhaul, the speaker argued Tuesday that lawmakers need time to reach a bipartisan solution on the issue, according to the Times.

But Trump appears immovable.

"It’s a catastrophic event," he said. "I feel that repeal and replace have to be together, for very simply, I think that the Democrats should want to fix Obamacare. They cannot live with it, and they have to go together."

And to those Democrats who fight Trump on his plan to repeal and replace Obama's signature health care legislation, the billionaire businessman promised to campaign against them in the states he won on Election Day.

"I won some of those states by numbers that nobody has seen. I will be out there campaigning," Trump said.

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