In many ways, the news that former Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign this week for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed seems appropriate. Perhaps a candidate whose campaign floundered in large part due to her support of single-payer health care can explain to El-Sayed why support for socialized medicine will become an albatross around his neck.
During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Harris took nearly as many positions on single-payer health care as there are days in a week. In a CNN town hall with Jake Tapper in January 2019, she admitted her support for canceling people’s current health insurance with a few flippant words: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
In a follow-up interview with Tapper in May 2019, she “move[d] on” from her earlier position. She told Tapper that “I really do need to clean up what happened on that stage” in January. She insisted that she supported the single-payer bill offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., but when Tapper rightly noted that “the bill gets rid of private insurance for everything,” Harris pointed out that “it doesn’t get rid of supplemental insurance.”
This new position would fall into the category of “too cute by half.” While Harris claimed that she supported private health insurance, she also claimed to support the Sanders bill, Section 107 of of which would ban all private coverage of treatments covered by the government-run plan. Claiming that you support “private insurance,” but only for procedures like plastic surgery, is just a sneaky way to avoid admitting that you want to effectively ban private coverage and throw millions of Americans off their existing plans in the process.
A few months later, in July 2019, Harris tried yet another approach. She rolled out her own health care plan, one where she claimed she would “allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as a part of this system.” In many respects, this proposal offered the worst of both worlds — it would cancel the coverage that most Americans currently obtain from their employers, even as it held the potential to anger progressives by allowing some form of private health coverage. But given that Harris proposed implementing this proposal over a 10-year period — guaranteeing that full implementation would occur under a different president — it was unclear whether or how this vision would ever come to fruition.
Free Care for Illegal Immigrants
Harris could also educate El-Sayed on how socialized medicine would provide free, taxpayer-funded health coverage to those present in this country illegally. In the May 2019 interview with CNN’s Tapper where she revised her position on banning private health coverage, Harris also stated her support for allowing undocumented immigrants to qualify for free health benefits: “I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.”
In this respect, Harris stands far to the left of none other than Hillary Clinton. When testifying before Congress on health care legislation in September 1993, Clinton opposed allowing “illegal aliens” to receive taxpayer-funded benefits, because she believed it would encourage additional unlawful migration to the United States:
We do not think the comprehensive health care benefits should be extended to those who are undocumented workers and illegal aliens. We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country. We know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is. We certainly don’t want them having the same benefits that American citizens are entitled to have.
Political Loser
To the extent that any one issue sunk Harris’ 2020 candidacy, her constant flip-flopping on health care and single-payer prevented her from winning the Democratic nomination. She looked uninformed, inauthentic, and engaged in a constant, calculated game of political pandering rather than any deep-seated belief structure.
Notwithstanding his support from the left, El-Sayed faces many of the same political problems. As previously noted, his own wife doesn’t accept Medicare reimbursement in her psychiatric practice, which raises an obvious question: If Medicare is so good that you want to force all Americans to join a Medicare-like health plan, why doesn’t your wife participate in Medicare now?
In time, perhaps El-Sayed will discover what Harris did more than six years ago: that socialized medicine is a political loser — an ideological shibboleth that has little public support once voters understand its full implications.
