Collins: Senate will start from scratch on ACA's replacement

Courtesy / Office of Sen. Susan Collins U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

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Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” program Sunday morning, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, essentially proclaimed the health care bill narrowly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday dead on arrival as it moves on to the Senate.

"The Senate is starting from scratch," Collins said, as reported by Bloomberg. "We're going to draft our own bill, and I'm convinced that we're going to take the time to do it right."

Collins told host George Stephanopoulos that some of the bill's provisions will hit hard in states with older, rural populations such as Maine, citing the tax credit in the House bill as one example, noting that it's not adjusted for variations in income and geographic regions across the U.S., the newspaper reported.

Collins also noted that the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t released its assessment of the cost and impact of the House American Health Care Act.

Collins and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, introduced a separate health care bill in January called the Patient Freedom Act of 2017, as a comprehensive replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act that they said would give Maine and other states greater say in setting rules for their health insurance markets.

In a one-page summary released in January, Collins and Cassidy stated their proposed legislation, would repeal the ACA's "individual mandate, the employer mandate, actuarial value requirements that force plans to fit into one of four categories, the age band requirements that drive up costs for young people and the benefit mandates that often force Americans to pay for coverage they don't need and can't afford."

But it would keep what they characterize as "essential consumer protections," including "prohibitions on annual and lifetime limits, prohibition of pre-existing condition exclusions and prohibitions on discrimination. It also preserves guaranteed issue and guaranteed renewability and allows young adults to stay on their parents' plan until age 26, as well as preserving coverage for mental health and substance use disorders."

Collins said she'd like to see a bipartisan group in the Senate working on a bill, Bloomberg reported.