By Amos Barshad (August 2, 2024)
On a chilly Monday night in January 2019, Kamala Harris was in Des Moines, Iowa for a CNN town hall. At the time, Harris was the junior senator from California and one of nearly 30 candidates vying to be the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee. A few minutes into the event, a self-employed local resident named Renee Welk asked a pertinent, inevitable question: “What is your solution to ensure that people have access to quality health care at an affordable price?”
Without hesitation, Harris answered, “We need to have Medicare For All.” Then, as the applause rang out, she riffed beautifully. “To live in a civil society, to be true to the ideals and the spirit of who we say we are as a country,” Harris said, “we have to appreciate and understand that access to health care” is not a “privilege” but a “right.”
“It is inhumane,” she continued, “to make people go through a system where they cannot literally receive the benefit of what medical science can offer because some insurance company has decided it doesn’t meet their bottom line in terms of their profit motivation. That is inhumane.”
This wasn’t Harris’s first time publicly backing universal government-sponsored health care: In 2017, she was one of the first co-sponsors of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) sweeping Medicare For All bill. But never before Des Moines had Harris spoken about the issue so forcefully, so passionately, and under such a bright spotlight.
When CNN’s moderator Jake Tapper pushed her on whether that meant she would “eliminate private insurance,” Harris seemingly stayed resolute. She described the painful process of filing an insurance claim, of dealing with all of the required paperwork, of facing delays in coverage, and then said: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
