President Trump knocked Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” proposal Thursday morning, arguing the “government can’t run anything.”
“Let me just tell you, that the problem with Bernie’s plan, you have to pay four times the taxes that you’re paying right now, and one of the problems you would have is essentially — well he is probably okay with it, but nobody else is — you would no [have] money left. You would go, everybody would go out of business,” Trump told “Fox and Friends” Thursday morning in response to Sanders’ “Medicare for all” proposal.
“f you look at Bernie’s plan, it is catastrophe. Basically it is government-run. The government can’t run anything. They have proven that. Healthcare would be a disaster,” Trump said.
[Related: Trump: ‘The centrist Democratic Party is dead’]
Sanders, I-Vt., along with 16 Democratic co-sponsors, released the most popular single-payer healthcare bill in American history in September 2017.
Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill would have expanded Medicare into a national health insurance program, making every American citizen, including some 28 million who don’t have health insurance under Obamacare, eligible for the program. The bill would not have come into full effect for another three years, but it would have allowed children under the age of 18 to participate within the first year of its enactment.
While the bill never became law, the support for “Medicare for all” has grown within the Democratic Party.
A large coalition of 70 House Democrats formed the “Medicare for all” caucus in the House with the goal of pushing the single-payer system and researching universal healthcare systems around the world.
Funding has always been a concern for single-payer bills in the past, even from left-leaning groups. The left-leaning Urban Institute scored one of Sanders’ previous “Medicare for all” proposals in 2016 and found that it would increase federal spending $32 trillion in only a decade.
