Republicans will make the same mistake as Democrats if they pass healthcare reform legislation on a strictly partisan basis, Rep. Charlie Dent, one of the few Republicans to vote against the House's American Health Care Act, said Wednesday.
"I believe we need to work this legislation from the center out," the Pennsylvania congressman told MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" program. "I said the same thing during the deliberation. The mistake Democrats made with Obamacare in 2010 was that they muscled this through on a partisan basis and we've been fighting about healthcare ever since."
Republicans are "making the same mistake," Dent said, if they refuse input from Democrats.
He also feels that many governors, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, should be included in the discussions, as they are "popular and have some very constructive suggestions."
Dent, meanwhile, thinks President Donald Trump's White House, just like former President Barack Obama's, "largely outsourced healthcare to Congress," and he believes the Senate largely took the House bill and used it toward crafting its own.
"Sen.[Mitch] McConnell was going to present a new bill," said Dent, but "the Senate bill was structurally similar to the House bill."
Dent said he'd thought the Senate would come from a different perspective, so if McConnell is writing a new bill, he'd "be curious to see how different it will be from the bill that passed the House and the bill that was just taken off the table."
Meanwhile, Dent said he does not believe healthcare is "the president's wheelhouse."
"He is much more focused on, and like a lot of people in Congress, too, not trying to be critical of the president, but I think a lot of members of Congress are more focused on tax reform," said Dent. "I've always felt too many, both in the White House and in congress, have looked at healthcare as a speed bump on the road to tax reform,"
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