Mike Huckabee: 'Let's quit telling people health care is going to get less expensive

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee said that politicians need to be honest with Americans about the price of health care, and explained why the cost of health was simply not going to decrease.

"Health care is not going to get less expensive," Huckabee declared, talking to Martha MacCallum on Fox News Monday.

"We've got to just suck it up and accept the fact that because technology is so dramatically different," he explained, "50 years ago medicine was house calls, it was you got penicillin and aspirin. They were still using ether in the operating rooms, and that was about the extent of anesthesia."

"Today, we have tomography," he continued, "we have MRI, we have CAT scans, we have extraordinary nuclear medicine. We have procedures that were unthinkable 50 years ago. But they're very expensive, everybody wants them, everybody will feel like, 'I need to be able to access those.' "

"Let's quit telling people health care is going to get less expensive," he said.

"But the big picture is this," Huckabee continued, "we do not have a health care crisis in America, Martha, we have a health crisis. Because 80 percdent of all the dollars we spend on medicine are for chronic disease. We have people who are unhealthy, and that's where the cost is."

"You don't address that, I don't care what you do, there is no magic wand, no abracadabra, this system still gets more and more expensive," he concluded.

.@GovMikeHuckabee: "Let's quit telling people health care is going to get less expensive." #TheStory pic.twitter.com/yH31oC44rD

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 8, 2017

President Donald Trump has criticized Obamacare for raising premiums and deductibles and promised that the GOP repeal and replace bill called the American Health Care Act would lower both.

The AHCA passed the House of Representatives narrowly, but will face an uphill battle in the Senate, where Republicans have already said that they won't take up the bill directly but vote on their own legislation and send it back to the House.