A 2011 podcast appearance by Abdul El-Sayed, now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has resurfaced online, showing him describing how his vision for healthcare reform would raise costs for wealthier patients in order to expand access for others.
“We’re actually just going to give other people access to what you have and make yours more expensive. We’re not asking you to lose access. We’re just making yours more expensive. And not that much so, in fact. We’re making it marginally more expensive,” El-Sayed said on the Sense and Sustainability podcast at the time.
The comments were made during a discussion on inequalities in the healthcare system, more than a decade before El-Sayed became a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.
Healthcare expansion remains central to El-Sayed’s current campaign. He has repeatedly championed Medicare for All, a proposal to expand the federal Medicare program — which currently covers Americans 65 and older and some younger people with long-term disabilities — into a system covering everyone regardless of income, age or employment status.
“Medicare for All means no premium, no co-pay, no deductible. Doesn’t matter if you get a job, lose a job, turn 26, turn 65, get married, get divorced — it is there for you,” El-Sayed wrote in a post on X earlier this year.
Pushback from Wyoming
Critics of Medicare for All argue the plan would be too costly and fail to fix existing problems in the healthcare system. In 2019, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., criticized the proposal on the Senate floor.
“The [Congressional Budget Office] projects in its report on a single-payer plan that government spending on health care would increase substantially. They go on to say to cover the massive cost of government-run care, income taxes would have to at least double. Income taxes, American families — at least double,” Barrasso said. “Mark my words, Medicare for All would soon become Medicare for none.”
In the 2011 interview, El-Sayed defended the fairness of his approach, arguing it would not amount to redistributing wealth in a punitive way.
“We wouldn’t necessarily be ‘stealing from the rich to give to the poor’ in the U.S. because the rich will always have the ability to pay for the care that they need,” he said. “The argument would be that everyone’s premiums would go up a little bit. But for the people who actually have premiums now, what they’re losing in terms of the added costs on their health plans are more manageable to them than is the absolute lack of access to healthcare among the people that don’t have it now.”
El-Sayed maintained in the interview that the added costs for higher earners would be marginal.
His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it could provide further detail on the projected costs of his healthcare plan.
Having won the Democratic primary, El-Sayed will face Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman, in Michigan’s general election on Nov. 3.
