“I do not want to move in a hasty fashion," Sen. Tom Cotton says. | Getty Sen. Cotton: House GOP moving 'too quickly' on Obamacare repeal

Republicans in the House of Representatives are “moving a little bit too quickly” to pass the first wave of legislation intended to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Tom Cotton said Wednesday morning.

GOP members in the House rolled out their proposal Monday evening and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he expects to pass the bill to the Senate by the end of March. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he hopes to pass an Affordable Care Act repeal bill by the time his chamber adjourns for its Easter recess.


But Cotton (R-Ark.) cautioned against moving too quickly with the healthcare legislation. A more deliberate process, he said, will help keep Republicans from making the types of mistakes he accused Democrats of making when they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

“I think we’re moving a little bit too quickly on health care reform. This is a big issue,” Cotton said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We’re going to live with health care reform we pass forever or until it's changed in the far-distant future. So I don't think we need to introduce legislation on Monday and have one change to amend it on Wednesday.”

Already, the healthcare legislation has run into stiff opposition from the GOP’s conservative wing, many of whom feel the proposal rolled out Monday keeps in place too many of the Affordable Care Act provisions they oppose. Powerful conservative groups, including FreedomWorks, The Heritage Foundation and The Club for Growth have all come out in opposition to the bill.

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In the Senate, four Republican members have come out against the bill, unhappy over its cuts to Medicare. And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has, like Cotton, expressed an interest in slowing down the process and ensuring that it is done correctly. “We're not going to be judged by when we did it but how we did it,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Cotton said that despite the new bill’s relative brevity compared to the Affordable Care Act, it is still written in highly technical language and lawmakers will require more time to fully grasp and understand it. The bill “has some good measures,” Cotton said, but without more time to digest it, “it's hard to say right now where one stands on any particular provision or especially the bill as a whole.”

“I do not want to move in a hasty fashion. I want to get it right. I don't want to get it fast. And the senate certainly will not just be jammed with whatever the House sends over here,” he said. “We’ve only had this bill in public for 36 hours and to try to rush it through this week and then vote on it within the next few weeks really does harken back to some of the problems that Obamacare was created under.”