Pete Buttigieg attacked Bernie Sanders during the New Hampshire Democratic debate as a worse candidate for the general election because of his support for Medicare for All.
“There is now a majority ready to act to make sure there’s no such thing than an uninsured American and no such thing as an unaffordable prescription,” Buttigieg said in an exchange regarding Sanders’s viability during the Friday night debate. “Just so long as we don’t command people to accept a public plan if they don’t want to.”
Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would enroll everyone in the United States in a government plan and ban private insurance.
Buttigieg advocated for his “Medicare for all who want it” plan, which would allow instead for people to buy into a government plan if they prefer it to their private insurance.
Sanders, a Vermont senator, and Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, were pitted against each other in the debate after finishing in the top two in the Iowa caucuses.
