In the Wake of the GOP’s Healthcare Failure, Bernie Sanders Will Push Medicare For All

As Donald Trump and the Republicans pushed for an Obamacare repeal, Senate Democrats—including Bernie Sanders—presented a united front. The goal was to protect the ACA, and though they didn’t have enough votes to do it on their own, their message was concise and consistent. Now that the Republicans have failed, however, and have essentially signaled that they’re giving up the fight, Sanders has moved on to a more ambitious goal: The passage of a single-payer healthcare system. Per The Guardian:

The Vermont senator will spend the next several weeks leading a campaign to build support for his plan before unveiling the bill next month. On Wednesday, he launched a six-figure digital advertising campaign on Facebook and Google that encourages supporters to become “citizen co-sponsors” of his plan, which he calls “Medicare for All”, according to Sanders spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis, a reference to the public healthcare program for older Americans.

“Bottom line is: if other countries around the world are providing quality care to all their people, we can do the same,” Sanders told NPR in an interview on Tuesday.

It was hard enough to prevent the Republicans from making matters worse, but Sanders knows that changing the entire system will be harder still. It involves taking on insurance and pharmaceutical industries directly, and their power runs deep even among Democratic politicians. The only way to accomplish this goal is to generate massive popular support—there’s no way the current Congress can be swayed without it—and thus Bernie is taking the fight to the people. If his massive disadvantage is a fight against very powerful special interests, his advantage is the simplicity of his message, and the fact that he’s advocating a policy supported by 60 percent of Americans…a number that, you’d think, can only go up.