Booker: ‘I Support Medicare for All...In This Country Health Care Should Be a Right’

‘We’re going to get there’

RUSH EXCERPT:

AXELROD: “I’m interested in what you said about not being a prisoner of ideological purity when trying to get things done. It’s a very pragmatic point of view, but I watch you in this race trying to navigate these forces. So you are a co-sponsor of senator Sanders Medicare for all bill. Then I hear you talking about it, and you’re very quick to acknowledge that, no, you probably are not going to transform the whole health care system overnight, yet there are transitional steps. Feels like you’re checking the box but also cooling the expectation?”
BOOKER: “Having a debate with my staff. Pulled up a tweet from when I was mayor talking about universal health care. Something you’re mayor and see the brokenness of the system that we spend so much money on, because the system is perverted. If we designed a system that doesn’t work, hyperexpensive, this would be the system we design. I support Medicare for all because I think it’s the best way to get to the common debt Republicans and Democrats have. In this country health care should be a right. It shouldn’t be something that privileged people have money versus people who don’t.”
AXELROD: “The big you signed on to takes it all in one swallow.”
BOOKER: “Yeah. And again, I’m not going to be one of those people that’s afraid to tell people what my vision and hope is. I do believe if I’m, the president of the United States, the first thing I can do is — by the way, 150 million or so people have private insurance, really like their insurance. You’ve got to start building the kind of coalitions needed to make progress towards expanding care and lowering costs. Yes. First thing interested in, lowering the Medicare eligibility. In a pragmatic way. 55, one vote shy of doing that in the Senate, and that’s going to help to actually lower costs of private insurance getting older people out. Common sense things to lower prescription drugs. What you do when you are a person who’s governor, you find the things you can do to move the ball down the field. Intolerable we’re a nation everybody doesn’t have access to health care. We’re going to get there.”

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