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Kamala Harris is telling wealthy donors something different about Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all plan
It's still a little unclear exactly where Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) stands on Medicare-for-all.
At a fundraiser in the Hamptons this weekend, Harris told a crowd of wealthy donors that she isn't "comfortable" with the health care plan espoused by her Democratic presidential primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), which Harris once co-sponsored. She did maintain, however, that she is still supportive of Medicare-for-all at large, adding a little more confusion to her policy position.
"I think almost every member of the United States Senate who's running for president and many others, have signed on to a variety of plans in the Senate," she reportedly said at the fundraiser. "And I have done the same. [A]ll of them are good ideas, which is why I support them. And I support for Medicare-for-all. But as you may have noticed, over the course, I've not been comfortable with Bernie's plan, the Medicare-for-all plan."
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As recently as April of this year, Harris' office sent a press release saying she had joined Sanders in introducing the Medicare-for-All Act of 2019. So, considering the audience Harris had over the weekend, it might have seemed as if she was backtracking as a result of "political convenience," but her campaign assured The Daily Beast that she reached her current conclusion after having worked on the issue more. Harris does have her own formal health care plan now which aims to phase in Medicare-for-all over the course of a decade and seeks to avoid middle-class tax hikes as a method for funding.
Sanders, though, doesn't seem to be taking too kindly to reports of Harris' remarks. Tim O'Donnell
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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.
