Ben Cardin: Democrats are willing to work with GOP on health care fixes

Sen. Ben Cardin said Monday that Democrats want to work with Republicans on fixing Obamacare, but are unwilling to repeal it.

“Democrats have talked with Republicans. We’ve been doing this for many months trying to get together to see areas where we can improve the law. They weren’t interested. This bill came out of nowhere. It didn’t come out of committee hearings. It didn’t come out of any committee markup process,” Mr. Cardin said on CNN.

The Maryland Democrat said that he hopes the two parties can find a way to work together to bring down Obamacare’s cost and offer more coverage to people.

“I hope Democrats and Republicans can work together in a way that we can provide more coverage to people and better quality coverage at a more affordable cost,” he said.

But Mr. Cardin said he is unwilling to support a repeal and belated replacement, which has been suggested by Republicans, because he said it would cause too much instability in the marketplace.

“That’d be terribly irresponsible. It would leave such uncertainty in the insurance market place that it will cause chaos, and it will cause a lot of people to lose affordable coverage. Look, we want to improve the Affordable Care Act — not repeal it, improve it — deal with cost issues, the cost of premiums [and] the cost of health care,” he said.