At Fox Town Hall, Bernie Sanders Still Can’t Explain How He’s Paying For ‘Medicare For All’ By Mark Hemingway for The Federalist
Sanders doesn’t have a health care plan, so much as a branding strategy for one. Medicare is very popular, but it’s already bankrupting the nation.
Appearing at a Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on Monday, Vermont senator and socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders turned in a fiery and combative performance. One moment particularly seems to be generating a lot of excitement.
After an audience member asked about his “Medicare for all” health plan, which would require eliminating private health insurance, Fox host Bret Baier decided to poll the audience to ask if they would prefer Bernie’s plan to their existing health insurance. Here’s what happened:
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Bret Baier just polled the Bernie Town Hall audience who would be willing to switch to #MedicareForAll. It backfired spectacularly. pic.twitter.com/dQJ9gfQ137
— jordan (@JordanUhl) April 15, 2019
This is a bit unfair to Baier, since it assumes he asked the question in bad faith, rather than knowingly asking the politically diverse crowd Fox assembled for the event their opinion on the matter. Further, it doesn’t really tell us much that a room half full of Democratic voters and Bernie supporters prefer some imaginary, aspirational future where the government pays for health care and there are minimal problems, as opposed to the warts-and-all reality of what we have now. (Certainly, it’s appealing enough that four other Democratic presidential candidates have chosen to co-sponsor his recently introduced “Medicare for all” legislation in the Senate.)
That’s especially true since Sanders hasn’t done a good job of explaining “Medicare for all,” to put it mildly. Asked about the specifics of his plan, Sanders employed the tried and true three-step explanation for how it works.
