Rep. Chris Collins said Monday that House Republicans are done with Obamacare repeal and are moving on to tax reform.
“We’re moving on to tax reform,” the New York Republican said on CNN. “I’d say the insurance companies are going to have to deal with what they’re going to have to deal with. We tried. We tried to fix this thing and it didn’t play out. So this is the law of the land. Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Mr. Collins said that moderate House Republicans, of which he said he is a member, met with Democrats in what he described as “a waste of our time.”
“They said we’re not going to work — we’re not going to talk about ending expansion, the 90 percent reimbursement for able-body adults,” he said. “They basically said we’ll tweak something here and there, but we need more money to do this, we need more money to do that and we’re not talking about rolling back expansion of medicaid. It was all but a joke — frankly a waste of our time.”
Mr. Collins said that Republicans will not accept responsibility for what happens, however, since it was Democrats who refused to help them make changes to the law.
“Not a single Democrat stood with us when we tried to fix it and now they’re going to say this is our fault? Give me a break,” he said.