Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Thursday that the healthcare bill proposed by fellow Republicans would need a “fundamental overhaul” to win her support.
“I want to make clear to the Republican leaders that just tinkering with the bill will not be sufficient to win my support,” said Collins, speaking on local Maine radio station WGAN. She stressed that she was concerned about projections of the bill from the Congressional Budget Office that showed 22 million people would be uninsured by 2026 and that found spending on Medicaid would be reduced by about $700 billion. The consequences, she said, would jeopardize care at rural hospitals, for older Americans and for low-income people.
Collins, a centrist Republican, has spoken out about the need to approach healthcare by working with Democrats instead of only along party lines. As fellow Senate Republicans have focused on rhetoric about “repeal and replace,” Collins has said the need instead is to fix the current law. She would support a bill that would preserve the number of people who are currently covered under Obamacare and is also concerned over projections about increasing premiums in the short term and projections that show deductibles would rise, she said.
Still, Collins said Obamacare has several problems of its own. She noted that insurers are leaving the exchanges and that many are finding health insurance to be unaffordable.
“The system does need to be reformed. … I’m opposed to this bill because I don’t think it does the job and would make matters worse in many cases,” she said, adding that doing nothing would result in premium increases and coverage loss.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday canceled a planned Thursday vote on the healthcare draft, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, after it became clear that he did not have enough votes to guarantee passage. Republicans are advancing their bill through reconciliation, which requires only 50 votes for passage, assuming a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence. No Democrat will vote for the legislation, but because Republicans have only a 52-48 majority, they cannot afford to lose more than two votes to pass a bill. McConnell is aiming to hammer out differences and to draft a new bill by Friday so he can send it to the CBO to be scored.
Conservative members of the Senate, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah, were among the first to oppose the bill because they said it kept too much of Obamacare in place. Centrists, meanwhile, have echoed many of the concerns Collins laid out. If the bill moves further left, it could alienate conservatives, and vice versa. Collins said she would not support proposals from conservatives to repeal assistance to the states or change consumer protections created under Obamacare.
Asked whether she saw a path forward for Republicans, Collins replied: “It’s going to be very difficult to thread the needle, there’s no doubt about it. … I think the answer is to have some public hearings, bring in experts. This is enormously complex … when you change one part [of the healthcare system] it has a ripple effect.”
Collins introduced a bill this year with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., which would allow states to keep Obamacare or craft their own plans. She raised the possibility of starting with that bill, called the Patient Freedom Act, in her conversation with the radio station, and said she was meeting with centrist Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The approach on healthcare, she said, should be to bring both parties together.
Initially, she said, “the Democrats had decided they were not going to be negotiating. I think that’s about to change.”
