Centrist Democratic presidential candidates fired shots at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren during the second round of debates Tuesday over their defense of “Medicare for all.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont defended his Medicare for All Act, which would gut private health insurance, telling former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, “You’re wrong!” that support for such a fully government-funded healthcare system amounted to “political suicide.”
“Nobody can defend the dysfunctionality of the current system,” Sanders said, pointing throughout the debate to problems in the current healthcare system, including high out-of-pocket costs and the fact that people lose their healthcare when they change jobs.
Delaney, who has proposed giving everyone in the U.S. a basic healthcare plan while allowing private insurers to continue to operate, said it wasn’t necessary to abolish private health insurance.
“We don’t have to be the party of subtraction, telling half the country that their private insurance is illegal,” he said.
While Warren tried to caution her Democratic colleagues against “using Republican talking points,” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said soon after that “it used to be Republicans who wanted to repeal and replace, now we have Democrats who want to as well.”
“It took us decades of false starts to pass the Affordable Care Act. Let’s build on it,” he said of Obamacare.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke both support a system that allows the uninsured to enter a government program similar to Medicare, and that would allow others to buy into it, potentially enacting a fully government system more gradually.
“If the public alternative is more comprehensive and more affordable, then we’ll see Americans walk away from the corporate options and into the government options and it will become ‘Medicare for all,'” Buttigieg said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who, like Bullock, wants to give people the option to buy into a government plan known as a “public option,” said her approach would be more swift.
“I want to get things done,” she said. “People can’t wait.”
