Senator Cassidy on Jimmy Kimmel takedown: 'I'm sorry he does not understand'

Senator Bill Cassidy has offered a response to Jimmy Kimmel, who heavily criticized the Louisiana politician over the newly proposed Obamacare replacement. “I’m sorry he does not understand,” Cassidy told CNN’s New Day host Chris Cuomo on Wednesday, the morning after Kimmel delivered his impassioned and fiery late-night show monologue.

Cassidy claimed that, on the new bill put forth by himself and Senator Lindsey Graham, “more people will have coverage and we protect those with pre-existing conditions. States like Maine, Virginia, Florida, and Missouri, there will be billions of more dollars to provide health insurance coverage for those in those states who have been passed by Obamacare and we protect those with pre-existing conditions.”

However, the new repeal effort would cut Medicaid and adversely affect those states with Medicaid expansion. Though Cassidy insisted to the contrary, Cuomo fought back that the bill also would allow pre-existing conditions to “be up to pricing of the particular state and market.”

On Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday night, the host stated Cassidy “wasn’t very honest” about health care and slammed Republicans for trying to “sneak this scam of a bill” into law.

“It seemed like he was being honest; he got a lot of credit and attention for coming off like a rare reasonable voice in the Republican party when it came to health care for coming up with what he called — and I didn’t name it this, he named it this — the Jimmy Kimmel Test. Which was, in a nutshell, no family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can’t afford it,” he said.