U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and other lawmakers head to the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington last week for a meeting on a revised Republican health-care bill.
AP
With the apparent demise of the Senate Republican’s health-care bill, President Donald Trump and others have called for repealing the Affordable Care Act without having a successor program in hand.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said Tuesday she’s opposed to repeal alone.
“I do not think that it’s constructive to repeal a law that is so interwoven within our health-care system without having a replacement plan in place,” she said in prepared comments.
Trump said in a statement on Twitter that the ACA, often called Obamacare, could be repealed with a two-year delay to give lawmakers from both parties time to come up with a new alternative working from “a clean slate.”
The plan put together by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell failed, the president said, because “we were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans,” presumably including Collins, one of four GOP senators who declared her opposition to the Senate bill.
Collins said the proposal was simply too tough on Medicaid and left too many people without insurance.
Collins said that opting for repeal alone is no answer either.
“We can’t just hope that we will pass a replacement within the next two years. Repealing without a replacement would create great uncertainty for individuals who rely on the ACA and cause further turmoil in the insurance markets.”
She said she will vote against a motion to repeal the ACA without a replacement, the same stance she took in 2015 when the GOP approved a repeal-only plan. President Barack Obama vetoed it.
The Congressional Budget Office in January examined the impact of Obamacare repeal without a new plan to replace it. It determined that 32 million Americans who would be insured with the ACA would lack insurance by 2026 if the program was axed.
Collins, a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said she’s called on the committee’s chairman, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, to “begin to hold hearings to examine ways to fix the many flaws in the ACA so that it will work better for all Americans.”
U.S. Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent, has never supported repeal of the ACA. He is likely to issue a statement later today on the new plan offered by Trump and McConnell.
This story will be updated.
scollins@sunjournal.com
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