By CASEY TOLAN | ctolan@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
SAN FRANCISCO — As the latest Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act appeared to take a fatal blow on Friday, two liberal heavyweights boosted single-payer health care plans as the best alternative approach amid growing national interest in the once-unlikely system.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders received a hero’s welcome from the California Nurses Association as he urged support for his Medicare-for-All bill in Congress and denounced the latest GOP health care bill.
A few hours before Sanders spoke, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom came within a whisker of endorsing a state bill to create a single-payer health care system, urging state lawmakers to move it out of committee, where it has been blocked by legislative leaders.
Their speeches came as Arizona Sen. John McCain announced his opposition to legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy that would repeal Obamacare and turn billions of federal health care dollars over to the states. The bill would result in $138.8 billion in federal funding cuts to California from 2020 through 2027, an analysis by the state Department of Health Care Services found.
Sanders thanked McCain for his stance, calling the legislation “even worse” than previous GOP health bills.
“Our struggle on this legislation is not over,” the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate said. “We’re going to defeat this disastrous Graham-Cassidy bill, and then we go on to pass Medicare-for-All.”
Medicare is a single-payer system that currently covers people age 65 and older, and the state’s single-payer bill sponsored by the nurses’ association would replace all health insurance companies with a taxpayer-supported, state-run plan.
Friday’s event felt like a campaign rally — complete with the same Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack from Sanders’ presidential primary ads — and many attendees said they hoped to see him run for president again in 2020. “Run, Bernie, run!” they chanted as he came onstage.
The 76-year-old Sanders, who introduced his Medicare-for-All bill in the Senate earlier this month, has recruited 16 co-sponsors for the bill, including Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California. While its chances of success in a Republican-controlled Congress are almost nonexistent, Sanders promised a wholehearted fight for the bill.
Sanders’ advocacy has already made single-payer, once considered a radical notion, part of the mainstream health care debate. A Harvard-Harris Poll released this week found that 52 percent of Americans favor a single-payer system, compared to 48 percent who oppose it.
“Medicare for senior citizens has worked, and we want Medicare to work for every man, woman and child in this country,” Sanders said. “After decades of talk, now is the time to get it done.”
Some Democrats had accused Sanders of focusing too heavily on his single-payer bill at a time when the Graham-Cassidy legislation appeared to be close to passing. But he argued that it was important to keep up the Medicare-for-All fight and defend Obamacare at the same time.
“We must be honest and acknowledge that with all the gains of the Affordable Care Act, it has not gone far enough,” he said. “Maintaining the status quo is just not good enough.”
About 2,000 people crowded into Yerba Buena Gardens to see Sanders’ speech, with the contingent of nurses making up a sea of red T-shirts. Some were literally feeling the burn on an uncharacteristically hot and sunny San Francisco day.
Nurses passed around iPhone selfies of themselves with Sanders and shared horror stories of how cost-cutting insurance companies shafted their patients. Zenisa Quebral, an intensive care unit nurse in Stockton, said she’s had patients get sicker after insurers required her to do cheaper procedures when more expensive ones were necessary.
“We see firsthand why we need Medicare-for-All,” Quebral said.
Jo Ann Lingle, 73, who came from Chicago for the convention, said she thought Sanders should make another try for the presidency.
“He’s a champion,” she said. “We see so much of our health care dollars wasted in profits, and he wants to use it for people.”
Earlier Friday, Newsom voiced support for California’s single-payer legislation. Senate Bill 562 has been stuck in the state Assembly, where Speaker Anthony Rendon has blocked it, saying the bill is incomplete because it doesn’t say how the new system would be funded.
“It’s time to move 562 along,” Newsom said to cheers and a standing ovation from the nurses. “It’s time to do that now.”
While he didn’t explicitly endorse the bill in its current form, Newsom articulated his strongest support for it so far and vowed a “firm and absolute commitment” to pass universal health care if he’s elected governor next year. “No one is saying it’s perfect or complete, but that’s not the point. That’s what the legislative process is all about,” he said.
In his speech, Newsom barely mentioned the Graham-Cassidy bill, but he later told reporters that the bill was “a potential tsunami the likes (of which) we never could have imagined” for California.
He rejected criticism from some Democrats that liberals should be talking more about Graham-Cassidy than about single payer. “This whole idea that we can only do one thing at a time is insulting, not just absurd,” he said. “Fundamentally the problem of the Democratic Party is that … we have no positive alternative vision.”
RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of the nurses’ association, which has been California’s loudest voice for single-payer health care, praised both Newsom and Sanders.
“Wherever it is down the line, when there is the next president of the U.S. that comes from California, it will be Gavin Newsom,” she said.
But he would have to wait for Sanders, she said: “Next time, hopefully, we want Bernie Sanders for president.”
