Tom Price slammed Obamacare as a “system that works for government or insurance” but not the American people. | AP Photo Price on Obamacare replacement: ‘Nobody will be worse off financially’

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said Sunday that “nobody will be worse off financially” after Republicans in Congress repeal and replace Obamacare.

“I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through, understanding that they’ll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their family, not [that] the government forces them to buy,” Price told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired Sunday. “So there’s cost that needs to come down, and we believe we’re going to be able to do that through this system. There's coverage that’s going to go up.”


House Republicans unveiled their legislation to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act last week. Their plan, however, was met with opposition from a mixture of moderate and far-right lawmakers, as well as powerful outside conservative groups.

The plan, formally called the American Health Care Act, has been marked up and advanced through key committees. Congressional Republicans and the White House hope to have their replacement plan signed into law before Congress recesses for Easter.

In Sunday’s interview, Price slammed Obamacare as a “system that works for government or insurance” but not the American people.

“We need a system that works for people,” the former Georgia congressman added. “I believe, and the president believes firmly, that if you create a system that’s accessible for everybody and you provide the financial feasibility for everybody to get coverage, that we have a great opportunity to increase coverage over where we are right now, as opposed to where the line is going right now where people are losing coverage and we’re going to have fewer individuals covered than we do currently.”

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Price also dismissed a Brookings Institution estimate that projects the Congressional Budget Office to report that as many as 15 million fewer Americans could be covered under the Republican replacement plan.

“Well, I’ll tell you that the plan that we’ve laid out here will not leave that number of individuals uncovered,” Price said. “In fact, I believe, again, that we’ll have more individuals covered.”

The HHS secretary declined to provide a specific measure of success for the AHCA five years down the road but maintained that the GOP’s replacement will be better than Obamacare.

“Yeah, tough to put numbers on it. But success, it’s important to look at that, and it means more people covered than are covered right now, and at an average cost that is less,” he said. “And I believe we can firmly do that with the plan that we've laid out there.”