Sen. Amy Klobuchar attacked fellow 2020 Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders for his promise to virtually eliminate private health insurance in America, saying the policy would doom their party in the November general election.
“I think Sen. Sanders’s idea of kicking 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years is wrong,” the Minnesota Democrat said. “That’s why I don’t think he should be leading the ticket. I think I should be leading the ticket because my ideas are much more in sync with bold ways of getting things done.”
A new poll in Iowa showed Sanders surging ahead of the rest of the shrinking 2020 field, with 25% of prospective Democratic voters in the state saying he is their first choice to take on President Trump.
The Vermont senator, a self-described Democratic socialist, has spent his two campaigns for president and much of his political career railing against private health insurance providers in the United States, whom he often paints as greedy and inhumane. His Medicare for All act, therefore, goes hand in hand with outlawing private health insurance.
“The giant pharmaceutical and health insurance lobbies have spent billions of dollars over the past decades to ensure that their profits come before the health of the American people,” Sanders’s campaign website says about his plan. “We must defeat them, together.”
Klobuchar, meanwhile, has positioned herself as a more moderate Democrat, saying the Affordable Care Act should be revamped but not completely done away with.
“The Affordable Care Act to me was always a beginning and not an end,” Klobuchar said last year. “There are a lot of good ideas out there, but they all, to me, move in the same direction, and that is to get to universal healthcare and to make sure we do it in a way that doesn’t make things worse for people.”
The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses are Monday, Feb. 3.
