Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) hit back at 2016 rival Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on his health care plan by reminding his Twitter followers that the head of her campaign had appeared to have endorsed his ideas in the past.
Sanders resurfaced a 2013 Tweet from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, in which Podesta said, “Just applied online for Medicare. Took 5 minutes. Single payer anyone?”
Sanders added onto Podesta’s Tweet Monday, “If you ever want to work for a campaign that shares your values on health care, there’s always room at Bernie 2016.”
If you ever want to work for a campaign that shares your values on health care, there’s always room at Bernie 2016. https://t.co/sFhjtVhepF
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 11, 2016
Sanders is proposing a “Medicare for all” single-payer health care plan, which, particularly before the implementation of Obamacare, many liberals favored.
During her presidential campaign, Clinton has suggested Sanders’ plan amounts to a tax hike for the middle class and in a speech this week, suggested that it was a “risky deal” that would turn “over your and my health insurance to governors.”
Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told the Washington Post that the Vermont senator’s plan would put forth national legislation that all the states would follow in offering health care coverage.
“Secretary Clinton is inaccurate in suggesting that Republican governors would be able to circumvent the law and deny implementation in their states,” he said.
Perhaps the biggest single failure of the Obama administration was to not support the Public Option. We could have had the two visions of health care compete head to head and like the rest of the industrialized world, proven once and for all that the government can do a better and more cost-effective job than the insurance industry.
I fear that Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe in government involvement in health care, and will slowly undermine what progress Obama did make. Or maybe she’s just pandering to a campaign donor.
I’ll never understand why people think that the best entity to govern their healthcare is an insurance company.
Very strongly disagree. As President Obama has said specifically, given the politics at the time, single payer would never had made it through Congress. Aside from unanimous GOP obstruction there were a number of Democrats who would not support it either. To call that Obama’s biggest single failure is absurd. And to view it as you do is quite myopic. And simply wrong based on the precise dynamics that were at play. In an ideal situation single payer would have been the best of all possible worlds. Congress is never an ideal situation.
Do you really believe we could have gotten Public Option through? Not a chance, Plus from all I have read, it wasn’t such a good option because of the cost and that it wouldn’t give insurance to everyone and single payer would literally put private insurers out of business If you think that private insurers would stand for that you got another think coming. I am not sure how many people are employed by these companies but it has to be in the tens of thousands and that would not have gone over well in 2009 when the country was suffering a huge economic crises and had the country had already lost millions of jobs
Beyond baffling belief.