The Senate held a hearing in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday — and Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders got the worst of it.
Sanders took the opportunity to sloganeer about his plan for health care. That attracted the ire of other committee members… especially Sen. Tim Scott, R–S.C.
“There’s a simple issue. Is healthcare a human right in which all people regardless of income are entitled, or is it not? It’s a fundamental question,” Sanders said. “I happen to believe that it’s a human right.”
Sanders went on:
Is there something wrong, my friends, when the United States is the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to every man woman and child? Yeah. I think we are the odd guys out.
I think the other countries are right in saying that all people are entitled to health care, and in the midst of all of that, is there something maybe wrong when you got 90 million people in this country who are uninsured or underinsured, with high copayments, unaffordable premiums, et cetera, and yet we end up spending by almost twice as much what other countries on earth are spending.
I live 50 miles away from the Canadian border, and somehow or another they do manage to provide quality health care to all of their people, spending possibly 50 percent per capita of what we’re spending. And you’ve got the pharmaceutical industry!
After that, Sanders proposed his controversial solution to the healthcare mess.
“So I say to my Republican friends, you tell your constituents why in some cases we are paying 10 times more for the same drug as people in other countries. Yeah. The system is broken,” Sanders said. “The answer is to guarantee health care to all people as a human right.”
After that, the committee heard statements from Sens. Mitt Romne, R–Utah, Tim Kaine, D–Va., and — of course — Scott.
Scott went especially hard on Sanders’s remark. He opened by saying:
See. Our colleague Sen. Sanders has left, and I will say that America and our government is obviously serious about providing quality health care to as many Americans as possible.
I think we spend somewhere near 400 billion dollars for V.A. We spent over 520 billion dollars on Medicare. We spend probably 350 to 400 billion dollars on Medicaid. We spend two or three hundred billion dollars on Obamacare. We have provided somewhere near 1.7 trillion dollars for health care…
I didn’t come here to argue about the issues. I came here to make a difference about these issues. And frankly I don’t think we have done a good job making a difference for the average person in this country, who watches the processes and the performances here in Washington, and they are sick to their stomach. And so when we hear that what we need is more money and we have actually no conversation, no debate over what we’re going to do with the money, of course it’s frustrating.
Scott voiced concerns over the contents of the multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package, and he took a victory lap by touting the accomplishments of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
We’re talking about spending more money this fiscal year than any country on earth has ever spent… I know the voters are watching, and I hope that the response and reaction that they have is an allergic reaction to this process and the spending…
We are frustrated by the lack of transparency that this nation has on the largest spending packages in the history of the country, and we’re frustrated by the fact that, when you call a COVID relief package — a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package — COVID relief but less than about one percent goes to vaccines and COVID percent goes to cove related health, yes we’re concerned about the definitions of the words we’re using when we have an infrastructure package that has about 10 in the next five years for roads and bridges.
It’s frustrating because the American people believe the words we use because the words we use are containers of power, and yet we deceive the American people in our packages by naming them something that sounds good but the details are so murky you can’t figure out what it is.
Then, Scott took issue with the Democrats’ tax policies intended to pay for the bill.
“Expecting 535 people in Washington to know what 330 million people should do with their money is ridiculous,” he concluded. “So we’ll give it back to you you make your decisions. It actually works.”
Sanders currently works as chair of the budget committee.
Watch Scott’s full speech here —
The Horn editorial team