Bernie Sanders repeats Obama ‘You’ll get to keep your doctor’ in push for Medicare For All
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is pushing the lie that has been attached to former President Obama and Obamacare: You get to keep your doctor.
photo/ donkeyhotey
While Sanders concedes that people will lose their private coverage under his plan, he insists that it won’t affect their choice of doctors or hospitals.
“What happens to the 180 million people in the private insurance market?” CBS’s John Dickerson asked Sanders as he announced he was running for president in 2020.
“They will continue to go to the doctors they want, the hospitals they want,” Sanders responded. “The color of their insurance card will change.”
He also pushed the lie earlier in the interview, when Dickerson asked him about polls showing that support for “Medicare for all” proposals collapse once people realize it will mean they’ll lose private insurance.
“That’s because we’re going to be taking on the insurance companies and the drug companies who are going to spend a whole lot of money distorting what we believe in,” he said. “For example, they’re going to say to people, ‘You’re going to lose your current health insurance at employment.’ Yeah, but you’re going to have the same exact doctor. You’re going to have more freedom of choice under our proposal than you have under the current proposals. So there’s a lot of misinformation that’s going around on this issue.”
Obama repeatedly promised that people who liked their doctors and healthcare plans would be able to keep then under his plan, when in reality millions lost their preferred coverage as the program got implemented.
The only way Sanders could make that guarantee is to force every doctor and hospital on every insurance plan to participate in his government-run program.
It’s not the first time Sanders has made the promise, even though he was warned that this was Obama’s Lie of the Year. In September of 2017, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explained to Sanders, at great length, just what it was he was promising.
“You’re making a version of the infamous promise from President Barack Obama… If you like your doctor, you can keep it. You’re making that — you’re saying at the end of what is going to be a radical transformation of the health care system, let’s be clear, that if you like your doctor you can keep it. That’s a marker you’re laying down?” Hayes asked.
“The answer is yes,” Sanders replied.
