Abdul El-Sayed Calls for Medicare-for-All, Freezing Property Tax for Seniors, and Taxing Billionaires to Pay for Programs

EXCERPT:

EL-SAYED: "I’ve talked to so many seniors who are struggling. They’re struggling because they paid their home off 30 years ago, but the property tax is getting too high. Their premium on their Medicare is unaffordable and their Social Security just doesn’t cut it. They're worried they might lose that Social Security. So, yes, absolutely, we have to lift the cap. It would make Social Security sustainable. But we’ve got to go further. I think we need to be eliminating the premiums, the co-pays and the deductibles on Medicare, and we need to make Medicare fully sustainable by extending it to everybody. Medicare-for-all would do exactly that. On top of that, I think we need to be freezing property tax for seniors. If you paid off your home, at some point we can't expect you to keep up with property taxes that are going up. And how do we pay for that? Well, again, if we tax billionaires, their wealth, if we were to invest in the Department of Education so that we’re paying centrally for public schools in an equitable way. There are a lot of opportunities for us to lift the burden off of seniors who’ve done their job. They’ve worked extra hard. They deserve a dignified retirement, and we've got to be thinking about how to offer them that."