U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro (Photo provided by Rep. Elise Stefanik)

As President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled their American Health Care Act to repeal “Obamacare” off the House floor Friday, Republicans and Democrats in the North Country and the rest of New York continued to blame each another for the country’s health care predicament.

Northern New York’s Republican representative in Congress, Elise Stefanik, released a statement though her spokesman Tom Flanagin late Friday afternoon in which she maintained former Democratic President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act “is broken” while also pledging she will continue work to find the best “21st Century” solution for health insurance.

“Constituents in our district continue to see double digit premium increases, sky-high deductibles and lack of access to the care they need,” Stefanik said through Flanagin.

“Throughout this process,” she continued, “I’ve fought for the needs of the North Country, and negotiated better access for critical issues like women’s health and maternity care. We need to continue working to find solutions we can agree on that will help fix our broken healthcare system. I am committed to achieving a 21st century healthcare system and will continue to work to replace Obamacare with reforms that lower costs, increase access and improve quality for hard working North Country families.”

Friday morning, before the bill was pulled, Stefanik was one of four Republican representatives who convinced Congressional leadership and the White House to include $15 billion in funding for maternity care, substance-abuse treatment and mental-health care in the ACHA.

“I spoke out in support of protections for mothers and children in meetings at the White House and with the House Leadership and Committee Chairs who have drafted this replacement legislation,” Stefanik said in a separate statement Friday morning.

Stefanik never said whether she supported the bill, either before or after it was pulled. Flanagin did not answer an Enterprise question Friday evening, after the vote was pulled, about whether Stefanik had planned to vote for it.

Stefanik’s only announced challenger for re-election in 2018, Democrat and former Bernie Sanders delegate Patrick Nelson of Saratoga County, said he was “a little disappointed” Stefanik never vocalized her support or disapproval of the AHCA.

“Regardless of her opinion on the bill, she should have been leading, not running out the clock,” Nelson said Friday evening.

Nelson added that he felt Friday’s outcome resulted in “a good day for the citizens of the district” and said the improvements he’d like to see with the ACA is choice in doctors rather than health insurance providers.

“Obviously there are improvements that need to be made,” he said. “We need to move toward universal health care, and this bill wasn’t moving in that direction. The U.S. is in a very advantageous position for health care — we get to look at everything tried the world over and take the best ideas. The ideas in the AHCA have never been tried anywhere in the world ever. The proposal was to take the ACA and make it worse.”

The head of the Tri-Lakes region’s largest health care provider was also pleased with Friday’s outcome. Adirondack Health has hospitals in Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, a nursing home in Tupper Lake and clinics in Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake and Keene.

Sylvia Getman, Adirondack Health’s president and CEO, said the hospital has remained in close contact with its federal legislators. North Country hospital CEOs teamed up to voice opposition to the AHCA in a recent opinion column.

“And we will continue to (communicate with federal legislators) as future changes to the American health care system are considered,” Getman said. “Regardless of how things played out in Washington this afternoon, our dedicated clinicians and staff would have woken up tomorrow morning with exactly the same focus: helping our patients achieve better health, and better lives. But it should come as no surprise to anyone that, as health care professionals, those of us not working the overnight shift will sleep a little easier tonight.”

New York Democrats serving in Albany and in Washington continued their criticism of Republicans such as Stefanik after the vote was pulled, much like they had all week.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand this evening credited Friday afternoon’s outcome to the efforts of outspoken New Yorkers who voiced their opinion in opposition to the bill. In a written statement, she said it “would have brought us back to the days when insurance companies could refuse to cover maternity care, and would have made health care much more expensive for families and seniors — all while giving huge tax breaks to insurance companies and drug companies. We should continue to work to improve our health care system, but this was a bad bill, and I’m glad it was stopped.”

Gillibrand’s fellow New Yorker serving in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer, was singled out along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the two “losers” Friday by President Trump. It came during a Trump interview session with the White House press corps when the president said numerous times the next step for him was to watch Obamacare “explode.”

In a statement issued through his spokesman, Schumer cited two “traits” as the reason why the AHCA bill failed to go to vote.

“Incompetence and broken promises,” Schumer said. “In my life, I have never seen an administration as incompetent as the one occupying the White House today. They can’t write policy that actually makes sense, they can’t implement the policies they do manage to write, they can’t get their stories straight, and today we’ve learned that they can’t close a deal, and they can’t count votes. So much for the ‘Art of the Deal.’

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dubbed this week’s AHCA negotiations “a disgusting display of government at its worst.”

“This bill appears to be on life support for now — it should be killed once and for all,” he added in a statement. “Republican leadership may have counted on the complexity of the issue to confuse the debate, but at the end of the day it’s actually quite simple. This Congress tried to play the people of this nation for a fool — they were wrong, and they lost.”

And Cuomo’s second-in-charge, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, took direct aim at Stefanik in her own statement on the AHCA. She was also critical of Republican New York Congressmen John Faso and Chris Collins.

“Rep. Elise Stefanik says she sold her vote for $15 billion to try to repair some of the damage the bill does to the country,” Hochul said. “If she was selling her soul, why didn’t she sell it for money to repair the damage the bill does to the North Country or the $6.9 billion it cost the state?”