Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) for pivoting from her support for his Medicare-for-All bill.
“I don’t go to the Hamptons to raise money from billionaires,” Sanders said on Twitter late Aug. 19.
“If I ever visited there, I would tell them the same thing I have said for the last 30 years: We must pass a ‘Medicare-for-All’ system to guarantee affordable health care for all, not just for those who can afford it.”
Harris, who co-sponsored Sanders’s radical bill, was campaigning in the Hamptons over the weekend when she revealed she no longer supports the legislation.
Harris told The Washington Post last week in comments reported on Monday that she was uncomfortable with the bill she once supported.
“I finally was like, I can’t make this circle fit into a square,” she said. “Look, I’m still committed to reining in the private insurance companies. They’re jacking up prices. But people want choice. And I don’t want to be in the business of just taking choice from them without figuring out a way to create options.”
Harris’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times about when she changed her mind on the bill and if she regretted co-sponsoring it.
Sanders, a self-described socialist, introduced the proposal in 2017. At the time, Harris said at a town hall that she was going to vote for it.
The bill states that it would “be unlawful for a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act or an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.”
“I happen to believe when I talk about healthcare it is a human right, and that applies to all people in this country,” he told the crowd at Fox Theatre in Detroit on July 30.
Sanders was among the slew of candidates who said they'd decriminalize illegal border crossings, changing the offense from a criminal to a civil one.