Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said she's very concerned about how plans for Medicaid cuts in the Senate healthcare reform bill will affect her state of West Virginia, as the program is a "wonderful safety net" for many of her constituents.
"I think reform is needed in the program to make the dollars go farther," Capito told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, and she thinks health professionals would agree.
Capito said she is not willing to go home and say the reform program won't work for West Virginia, which has the largest per capita population in the Medicaid program, but then tell them "I'm going to go for it anyway."
She said she does, however, believe President Donald Trump understands many parts of Obamacare are broken and need to be fixed, and that he did a "nice job" while meeting with Senate Republicans to discuss their concerns.
"He did say more than a few times, put more money into this, which obviously helps the lower income [people]," said Capito, noting she's concerned about the opioid crisis in her state.
"The president is definitely engaged, and I just talked to him again yesterday, so I think he's working the phones pretty well," Capito said.
The senator also discussed the way Senate Republicans in charge of pulling the legislation together have kept the talks behind closed doors, noting over the past seven years, there have been plenty of public discussions about the shortfalls of Obamacare.
"I don't have an opposition to public hearings, but I think you could see how difficult it's been with the only public document that came out last week to try to weave the balance," Capito said.
"I think Leader [Mitch] McConnell really has worked with all of us in a very open forum to try to figure out and all of us, I mean Republicans, all of us to try to figure out the best way or the pressure points that we feel."
Capito said the issues of mental health and opioid addiction treatments are at the core of West Virginia's potential difficulties with the bill, and what drove her to voice her opposition.
"Actually, 30 percent of West Virginia is on some kind of Medicaid," she said. "We need to find a way to either keep Medicaid expansion, give states the options, give states the flexibility to build in better programs or to have folks in that expansion population be able to afford it with tax credits and other supplements.
"That's where the opioid money comes in, and that's where I think it would be important for my population, which is really reeling, and if people around the country don't think they're going to get it, it's coming to their state."
Capito said she did not come to Washington to hurt people, and she's "not dropping them off a cliff" when it comes to their healthcare.
"A better case scenario is to have somebody on a private insurance plan that they can manage themselves," she said. "But if it's unaffordable, they're not going to do it. And so let's get that where it is instead of this, we're right there together, and the states can formulate that. I think it can be done, but it's not done in this bill."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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