Just hours after Donald Trump hosted House Republicans at the White House to celebrate voting to strip health-care benefits from millions of people, the president acknowledged that a single-payer system delivers better results.

“Right now Obamacare is failing,” Trump declared during a meeting with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in New York on Thursday evening. “We have a failing health care—I shouldn’t say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia, because you have better health care than we do.”

While Trump said that the Republican-passed health-care legislation is a “very good bill right now” and that the United States is en route to having “fantastic health care,” Trump—whether wittingly or not—praised a universal health-care system that, not unlike Obamacare, is government funded partly through taxes on the wealthy.

The irony of Trump applauding universal health care on the same day that House Republicans passed a G.O.P. alternative to Obamacare that will cut nearly $1 trillion in taxes for high-income households and cover approximately 24 million fewer people, was not lost on Bernie Sanders, a longtime advocate of a single-payer system.

The Vermont senator literally broke out in laughter during an interview on MSNBC after host Chris Hayes informed him of the president’s remarks. “O.K.! Wait a minute, wait a minute, Chris. The president has just said it. That’s great,” Sanders said gleefully, suggesting that Trump also take a look at the Canadian and European health-care systems.

“Thank you, Mr. President. Let us move to a Medicare-for-all system that does what every other major country on Earth does—guarantee health care to all people at a fraction of the cost per capita than we spend,” he continued. “Thank you, Mr. President. We will quote you on the Senate floor.”

To be fair, Trump’s comments aren’t completely out of the blue. As The Washington Post notes, the president has championed universal health care in the past, most notably in his book The America We Deserve. “Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, 'No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private,” Trump told CBS’ Scott Pelley in a September, 2015 interview. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not.” When Pelley asked him who would pay for it all, he responded, “the government's gonna pay for it.” To be fair, he also went on to say that it would be a “private plan” and that everybody “can have everything,” which belies any understanding of how the insurance market works.

Update: Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Sanders clarified Friday that she thought Trump was “simply being complimentary of the prime minister and I don’t think it was much more than that.” Shortly afterward, Trump himself muddied the waters yet again, tweeting that “everybody” has better health care than the United States—but that “our healthcare will soon be great.”