Collins urges Barr not to work to kill Obamacare

Sen. Susan Collins wants Attorney General Bill Barr to reverse the Justice Department’s aggressive move, seeking to obliterate the Affordable Care Act.

In a letter to Barr on Monday, the Maine Republican argues that if the Trump administration wants to change the health care law, it should come to Congress and ask. Otherwise, Barr’s department should be defending the law from a lawsuit seeking to cripple it, she says.

“Rather than seeking to have the courts invalidate the ACA, the proper route for the administration to pursue would be to propose changes to the ACA or to once again seek its repeal. The administration should not attempt to use the courts to bypass Congress,” Collins wrote to Barr, whom she supported in his confirmation vote in February.

Collins said in an interview last week that she doesn’t believe Republicans have any viable plan to replace Obamacare in a divided government, and her missive to Barr amounts to some of the harshest internal blowback yet that the Trump administration has received for supporting a lawsuit last week aimed at bringing down the law.

President Donald Trump is using the new legal threat to Obamacare to pressure his party to come up with an alternative to Obamacare and become “the party of health care.” Republican senators, Collins included, say they want to see a plan from the president before moving forward with anything.

In general, Republicans have been reluctant to put forward new, sweeping health care legislation after failing to repeal the law in 2017, an attempt Collins opposed.

And though she still says the law needs changes, Collins also tells Barr of her “profound disappointment” with the administration’s legal tactics to bring down Obamacare. The senator, who is up for reelection next year, said just because Congress eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in a 2017 tax overhaul doesn’t mean it was lawmakers’ intent to get rid of other portions of the law like protections for pre-existing conditions.

“Congress affirmatively eliminated the penalty while leaving these and other critical consumer protections in place. If Congress had intended to eliminate these consumer protections along with the individual mandate, it could have done so. It chose not to,” Collins wrote to Barr. “The administration should reconsider its decision and defend the remainder of the ACA.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/01/obamacare-collins-barr-letter-1246006
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