In a “Meet the Press” interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker that aired Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump was highly critical of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who helped defeat an attempt in Congress in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

McCain and two other Republican senators — Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins — joined Democrats and independents in a 51-49 vote against legislation aimed at dismantling the health care bill passed in 2010 during Barack Obama’s administration.

“They did us a great disservice, because we would’ve had great health — Obamacare is lousy health care,” Trump told NBC. “It’s very expensive health care for the people. It’s also expensive for the country, but for the people. It’s lousy health care. When John McCain gave his thumbs down after saying for 10 years that he wants to repeal and replace, okay, and then he came out, he put his now famous thumbs down and he became a hero to the left, just let me just tell you, if we find something better, I would love to do it.”

To revisit 2017, McCain’s vote was against a proposed “skinny repeal” during Trump’s presidency. It was intended to move the legislation from the Senate into negotiations with the House to form a final bill both chambers could pass.

The House legislation, the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act of 2017, faced difficulty because the Congressional Budget Office had estimated it would increase the number of people who were uninsured by 32 million by 2026.

Generally, critics said the bill’s tax cuts would help wealthy Americans but overall the plan would be bad news for recipients of tax credits who were older, sicker and poorer.

Prior to the “skinny repeal” attempt, the House bill had been defeated in the Senate in a 55-45 vote. Much like today, no specific Obamacare replacement plan had clear support.

In his “Meet the Press” interview, Trump veered from saying Obamacare is lousy to taking credit for saving it after the Senate’s 2017 vote.

“And I had a decision to make with health and human services,” he said. “I had a big decision to make. Do I make it as good as we can make it or do I let it rot? And a lot of political people said, ‘Let it rot and let it be a failure.’ I said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do.’ And I had very good people in the medical area that handled that. And I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘We really have an obligation to make it as good as we can,’ and we did. We made it as good as we can make it. Instead of, instead of making it bad, where everybody would be calling for its repeal, I made it so that it works.”

As a presidential candidate, Trump said in September that he has “concepts of a plan” for the future of health care. On “Meet the Press,” it was more of the same.

“We have the biggest health care companies looking at it,” he said. “We have doctors who are always looking. Because Obamacare stinks. It’s lousy. There are better answers. If we come up with a better answer, I would present that answer to Democrats and to everybody else and I’d do something about it. But until we have that or until they can approve it — but we’re not going to go through the big deal. I am the one that saved Obamacare, I will say. And I did the right thing.”

Summarizing Trump’s views is a challenge but here goes:

The president-elect believes Obamacare is bad but takes credit for preserving it after a 2017 repeal attempt failed. He resents those who defeated the repeal effort, even though no popular replacement plan was apparent. More than seven years later, he still wants something better, but we’ll have to see what that might be.