Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson says Congress must "use the purse strings" it controls to kill Obamacare, surgically excising it from the rest of the federal budget.
"Congress has a lot of power. They have powers to propose laws, to make laws. They have the ability to decouple the healthcare bill from the rest of the budget. They can do that," Carson told "The Steve Malzberg Show" Friday on Newsmax TV.
"This is what they should be doing so the president doesn't have a political football to throw around. They need to go on offensive here; don't just always sit around and play defense. You'll never win the game that way. ... Use the purse strings to kill it," he said.
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Carson, who is considering a run for president in 2016, took President Barack Obama to task for claiming Friday that the GOP has no alternative to the nation's healthcare issues, but wants only to destroy Obamacare.
"His claim that there is no other proposal, that's not true. I was in Capitol Hill two weeks ago talking to the Congressional Health Caucus. There's some very good plans in place," Carson said.
"Now is not the appropriate time to banter them about, but I call them scalpel-ready. They're ready to go, but there's no plan of putting them out there at a time when [Obamacare] is the law of the land."
Carson recently retired as head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
He said he believes doctors who practice under Obamacare are going to be smothered in paperwork.
"There's so much more documentation that you have to go through and you didn't really go into medicine to document everything. You went in to try to cure people," Carson said.
"Such a large percentage of your time is taken up by bureaucratic nonsense now. … What we really need to be concentrating on is, how do we return medicine to a situation where the relationship is between the healthcare provider and the patient?"
Carson, a columnist for The Washington Times, is author of "America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great."