U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told the Chattanooga Rotary Club last week he expects Obamacare to be repealed next year, but he told Capitol Hill reporters this week it could take years to fully repeal and replace President Barack Obama's signature health care bill.
Which is it?
Maybe both.
Even though Republicans gained majorities in the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, repealing and replacing Obamacare never was as simple as passing a bill with a simple majority, having Obama veto it and overriding the veto with a simple majority.
Some voters who cast ballots for Republican President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month may have believed it was - that he would do what establishment Republicans could not do and, with a pen and a signature, abolish it.
It's just not that easy.
When Democrats passed the bill - yes, with budget trickery and inside deals for some senators - they had 60 votes, a veto-proof majority. They didn't have it for long and they didn't do some of the things that Obama later had to do with reversible executive orders, but that passage does work to their advantage.
You may recall that majority Senate Republicans, to placate those who wanted action, passed a bill in January, the Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015, and sent it to Obama's desk. It would have repealed the health care bill's tax hikes, insurance exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion - roughly $2 trillion of spending over the next decade.
But even if Obama had signed it, and of course he didn't, it would not have rid the country of the law's tens of thousands of pages of insurance regulations, the fine print that is ultimately responsible for the rate hikes the insurance companies have had to request to not continue to lose millions of dollars on the program.
Still, some Obamacare opponents - at least one a member of the Trump transition team - believe there is a way to wind down all aspects of the law in a reconciliation bill, so that route may be tried.
But Alexander, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that will play a central role in whatever decisions are made about the health care act, wisely said in Washington that lawmakers need to "make [the] sort of transition to make sure we do no harm" and "create a good health care system that everyone has access to."
He didn't say there or in Chattanooga what that system might look like, but he did tell Rotarians that Trump and Congress should "get to work quickly on fixing the Obamacare emergency" of rising costs of premiums and, ultimately, should be able to give states and individuals more freedom and flexibility in their health care options, and "should reduce Washington's involvement in our lives."
We like that in a macro sense. What it's like in a micro sense down the road will be important.
Alexander said it will be critical for Republicans to first concentrate on what will replace Obamacare. And as we mentioned earlier this week, there will be a few things from the law that are likely to stay - the ability of people with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance and the ability for children to remain on their parents' plan until an extended age.
Tennessee's senior senator said the exchanges and the individual mandate need to go but that lawmakers don't need to try to make quick decisions. If somebody just rolls in a wheelbarrow with McConnellcare to replace Obamacare, he said, "they're gonna be disappointed."
Alexander said since the health care law was initially passed in the Senate with 60 votes, it will need 60 votes to completely repeal and replace. In January, Republicans will have 52 or 51 votes, depending on the outcome of next month's Louisiana runoff election.
Yet voters, with a Republican president and a Republican Congress in January, will be demanding action. Inaction won't cut it. If some kind of movement on the law isn't taken in 2017, even without the veto-proof majority, Republican incumbents may take a beating in 2018.
Whatever the right plans turn out to be and however soon they are completed, Alexander said, they should involve health care decisions that are made as close to the individuals affected as possible.
"That's a pretty simple formula," he said, "and if we can think of a way to replace what we have now, step by step, with a formula with fewer decisions in Washington, more by states and more by patients and consumers, then we will be on the road toward rebuilding our health care system."