Democrats Take Up The 'Medicare-For-All' Battle Cry, Is It All Just Rhetoric?

Published: Thursday, October 25, 2018 - 1:45pm
Updated: Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - 10:37am
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When Bernie Sanders started talking "Medicare-for-all" during his 2016 presidential campaign, it seemed like a far-flung idea.

But a new poll from National Nurses United shows that more than half of Democratic candidates in this year’s election support the idea.

After Republicans tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it’s become a central campaign issue for Democrats — including some big-name candidates who have taken up that battle cry, including Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York.

One of the leading voices on "Medicare for All" is Michael Lighty. He’s a founding fellow at the Sanders Institute and was a leader in the Healthy California campaign. He's in the Valley Thursday evening to hold a town hall on Medicare for All with Arizona progressives, including state representative Athena Salman and Rebecca Garelli of Arizona Educators United.

The Show got a hold of him to talk more about this, starting with a definition. A new poll shows that even a majority of Republicans support "Medicare for All," but much of the public is still unclear about what it actually means.

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