Sen. Bill Cassidy got testy with Chris Cuomo on Thursday while debating the American Health Care Act on CNN’s “New Day.”
The rebuke began after Cuomo leveled a series of challenges like this one: “When you do means-testing on a lot of the people who need the help, that you’re going to cut in the House plan, it doesn’t matter what you’re planning to give them. It’s not going to be enough.”
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The Louisiana Republican shot back at Cuomo that “when you keep saying ‘you,’ you must be talking to the person behind me.”
“No, senator. Look, you can’t run away from your party completely,” Cuomo tried to clarify, “What I’m saying is this is a House plan. I just want to address what’s on the table. … I guess that it’s not your plan.”
“You keep saying ‘you, you, you, you, you’ about the House plan which has not even passed the House yet,” Cassidy retorted a second time. “If you speak to senators, senators are concerned that if you look at lower income Americans, particularly those who are older, that the amount of service they get will be less what they need. That is going to be addressed.”
“Now as much as you want to say that this plan on the House side is absolutely what Republicans are doing, that’s not true. I gotta tell ya … it’s not true,” he continued. “And I share your concerns and the concerns of others. I’m a physician. I’ve been practicing in a hospital for the uninsured for 25 years. I know better than anybody the challenges such folks address. It is my commitment to help address those.”