[W]ASHINGTON — At a town hall event promoting his proposal to create a Medicare for all system, a video montage included a vintage clip of then-Rep. Bernie Sanders making the case on the House floor for single-payer health insurance.
“Who was that young guy?” Sanders said Tuesday night when the lights came up, eliciting chuckles from the crowd that filled the auditorium in the Capitol Visitors Center.
Sanders staff said some 1.1 million viewers tuned in online, and another 450 showed up in person, for what Vermont’s junior senator said was the first such event focused on single-payer ever hosted at the U.S. Capitol.
Sanders has touted a single-payer system throughout his political career, but the proposal has recently gained steam. Last year, his bill to create a universal Medicare system attracted 16 Democratic co-sponsors.
Sanders, an independent who organizes with the Democrats, moderated a conversation among panelists seated behind a desk, draped with a navy “Medicare for all” banner. Online media channels Now This, the Young Turks and Attn broadcast the slickly produced event live.
Over the course of an hour and a half, Sanders guided conversations on a single-payer system with nine guests on three different panels. Two Vermonters were among the guests — Deborah Wachtel, a primary care nurse practitioner and University of Vermont faculty member, and Jen Kimmich, who co-owns the Alchemist brewery in Waterbury.
The first panel focused on perceived shortcomings of the current health-care system, discussing how insurance plans can influence the decisions patients and medical professionals make.
“When we prescribe medications for patients, it becomes a circus,” Wachtel said.
Two patients with the same medical issues can end up with wildly different copays on the same prescription depending on their insurance plans, she said. The system takes up a lot of her time, often having to go back and forth with pharmacists multiple times to find a prescription that a patient’s insurance will cover.
Members of the second panel made business and economic arguments for a single-payer system. Kimmich said the Alchemist is committed to offering health insurance to the company’s 50 employees. However, getting to a point where the small but renowned brewery could afford to offer coverage took a long time — eight years.
Kimmich said she and her husband offer insurance for employees because they believe everybody should have access to health care. It’s also good for the business that its employees stay healthy, she said, but the cost is substantial — about $300,000 annually.
Kimmich later said in an interview that she’s had personal experience with the impact not having health insurance can have. Just after she and her husband first opened the Alchemist pub in Waterbury, she learned she was pregnant. She didn’t have insurance at the time and ended up waiting weeks for a doctor’s appointment in order to get coverage.
Don Berwick, who headed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, said the Medicare system is more cost-effective than private insurance because it has no frills — “no billboards, no high salaries.”
Sanders asked Berwick if there is a reason not to expand Medicare to serve people younger than the current age limit of 65.
“No, there’s no reason,” Berwick said. “It’s just will.”
In the third panel, Sanders asked medical professionals from Norway and Canada about their experiences with the universal health care systems in those countries
While the popularity of the single-payer proposal seems to be growing, its political prospects in the Republican-led Congress are dim. A few hours before the town hall, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a physician, took a swipe at the event in a post on Twitter.
Tonight @SenSanders will host a conversation about #MedicareForAll. @SenSanders if #MedicareForAll is implemented, how many people will lose their current coverage? Answer: EVERYONE with private coverage.
— Sen. John Barrasso (@SenJohnBarrasso) January 23, 2018
