Maine Sen. Susan Collins is not a part of the Senate Republican healthcare working group despite being the co-author of her own healthcare reform bill, and she says it is because Senate leaders wanted a different group of people.
“Well, the leaders obviously chose the people they want,” she said Sundayon ABC, “but I’m working hard with Sen. [Bill] Cassidy, with our co-sponsors … we’re reaching out to moderate Democrats. I would like to see us put together a bipartisan group to solve this challenge.”
Questions were raised across Washington when Collins and other centrist Republican women senators were not included in the GOP’s working group for healthcare reform. Instead, 13 male senators make up the entirety of the group. Collins and Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who is also not on the working group, offered up their own reform bill earlier this year.
Collins is one of the Republican senators who are already against the House-passed American Health Care Act, which she says won’t even get a foothold in the Senate. There are too many problems with the House bill— including not having an independent analysis of recent amendments that led to passage through the House — for her to support taking it up in the Senate.
She said the House bill doesn’t take into account income levels or geographic location when it comes to tax credits and doesn’t do enough to combat bad decisions that could be made by state governments.
“So much discretion is given to the states without any guardrails,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Instead, the Senate will write their own bill that solves the “legitimate flaws” in the Affordable Care Act while expanding on the law’s successes.
“The Senate is going to start from scratch,” she said. “We’re going to draft our own bill and I’m convinced we’re going to take the time to do it right.”
