Rep. Ilhan Omar said she has a “radical idea” to combat the coronavirus: making all hospitals public during the pandemic.
“Here is maybe a radical idea to deal with some of the pressures our healthcare system is facing: All private hospitals should be made public for the duration of the virus,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted Tuesday night.
Here is maybe a radical idea to deal with some of the pressures our healthcare system is facing:
All private hospitals should be made public for the duration of the virus.
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) March 25, 2020
Omar has previously called for “Medicare for all” and has given her support to self-described democratic socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“Imagine if the progressives consolidated last night like the moderates consolidated, who would have won? That’s what we should be analyzing. I feel confident a united progressive movement would have allowed for us to #BuildTogether and win MN and other states we narrowly lost,” Omar said, following Sanders’s Super Tuesday losses.
There are 55,525 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States as of Wednesday. Hospitals and lawmakers are scrambling to get more medical equipment to care for patients and to mitigate the spread.
Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said the U.S. has “transformed” and increased the number of people tested for the virus in the last week.
“I just want to speak to the Americans for just a second,” Birx said during a town hall on Fox News. “We have to ensure that we still are testing. Even though probably by today, we will have done more tests than South Korea did in eight weeks, in the last eight days. In the last eight days, we’ve done more testing than South Korea.”
