bernie sanders new hampshire Image by Getty

After President Trump lamented that replacing Obamacare would be difficult because “nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated,” Senator Bernie Sanders that many people already understood the issue’s complexity.

“Some of us who were sitting on the health education committee, who went to meeting after meeting after meeting, who heard from dozens of people, who stayed up night after night trying to figure out this thing, yeah we got a clue,” the Vermont senator told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday. “When you provide health care in a nation of 320 million people, yeah, it is very, very complicated.”

Sanders was on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Senate body that crafted the Affordable Care Act under former President Obama’s tenure. Republicans, despite their Congressional majorities, have struggled to coalesce around a way forward on healthcare, with disagreements over how to change or end the health care law. Trump initially wanted Obamacare to be “repealed and replaced” within the first month of his presidency, a goal that’s not been met as the issues gets bogged down in the policy weeds.

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