Sanders Says ‘Medicare for All’ Won’t Happen This Congressional Term

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 27, 2021. Graeme Jennings/Pool/Getty Images

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) claimed that due to a split Congress, a Medicare for All program “ain’t going to happen” in the next two years.

During an NPR interview aired on Feb. 21, the Independent senator asserted that there was not enough support for the program, even from Democrats.

The lawmaker said, however, that members of Congress may still use this congressional session to change health care across the nation.

When asked what he wanted to see the Senate do in the next two years, Sanders said that “obviously” he wanted to see a “Medicare for All system” but had little hope of it passing even the Democrat-controlled Senate.

“No Republicans support it. Half the Democrats won’t support it,” Sanders said. The Vermont lawmaker proposed, instead, that Congress pursue more local health care centers.

“We can expand primary health care and community health centers to every region of the country,” Sanders said.

He pointed to his home state of Vermont as an example, saying it is leading the country in the number of people accessing community health centers.

The program Sanders referenced included “affordable” health care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs.

According to Sanders’ website, the Medicare for All program that he believes the Senate won’t pass this term would create a “single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.”

The program would also have no networks, no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, and no surprise bills.

The coverage would include, at a minimum—dental, hearing, vision, home and community-based long-term care, in-patient and out-patient services, mental health, and substance abuse treatment, reproductive and maternity care, and prescription drugs.

Despite his lack of faith in Congress, Sanders recently noted that he believes President Joe Biden is a “much more progressive president than he was a United States senator,” as The Epoch Times previously reported.

Sanders complimented the president during a Feb. 19 interview on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” where he thanked Biden for meeting with the Vermont lawmaker’s staff to develop portions of his platform: “I think we came up with an agenda that was progressive.”

Sanders said that some of the early goals that the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress were able to accomplish in the first two years of Biden’s presidency were progressive victories, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

The lawmaker applauded the program saying, “I think the American Rescue Plan that we passed early in his agenda, in the midst of the terrible pandemic, the economic collapse, was, in fact, one of the most significant pieces of legislation for the working class in this country, in the modern history of America.”

Sanders’s office did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment.