She tried doing a lot of interviews in 2019 — and it ended badly.
She tried doing a lot of interviews in 2019 — and it ended badly.
D uring her first run for the White House, Kamala Harris hit the high-water mark on the night of June 27, 2019, when she mauled a flustered Joe Biden over his opposition to school busing in the 1970s. The California senator surged in polls overnight, from the mid single digits to 17 percent — putting her in second place and threatening Biden for front-runner status.
The problem for Harris was that the surge coincided with another moment that night — raising her hand to signal support for ending private health insurance — that drew more scrutiny of her incoherent health-care position. She would unravel in interviews on the topic and flub the release of a new health-care plan, and within six weeks, the same CNN poll that had her leaping into second place had her crashing back to 5 percent — tied for a distant fourth. Her campaign would never recover, and she was forced to drop out before Iowa.
While there were other factors leading to her collapse in the polls, the health-care issue dominated conversation during her brief time as a top-tier candidate. In her current campaign, aides claim (without any public explanation from Harris) that she no longer supports Medicare for All, a socialized health-insurance system, despite once claiming she was a strong supporter. Given Harris’s reluctant approach to interviews in the current campaign (agreeing to do her first one after more than a month of being a candidate, but only with running mate Tim Walz at her side), it’s clear avoiding the 2019 fiasco is no doubt at the front of their minds.
Understanding Harris’s problems on health-care policy requires going back to 2017, when as a first-year senator with presidential ambitions, she decided to join other Democrats in co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation that would have cost $34 trillion and eliminated private insurance for around 180 million people. After Sanders’s strong showing in the 2016 primary, the conventional wisdom was that the 2020 Democratic nominee was going to be somebody who would be able to tap into the energy from his movement while being a bit more palatable to the mainstream of the party. At the time, it was not clear that Sanders would try to run again, so there was a chance his supporters would be up for grabs.
In the run-up to her presidential campaign, eager to reassure progressives, Harris stood firmly behind the Sanders plan. She ran an ad on Facebook in the summer of 2018 declaring, “I was proud to be the first Senate Democrat to come out in support of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill.” In a January 2019 CNN town hall, she said of private insurance, “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.” In February, she told NBC, “I strongly believe that we need to have Medicare for All.”
By May, however, as Biden had become front-runner, it was clear there was a bit more appetite for a traditional Democrat, as opposed to a Sanders clone, than originally expected, so Harris tried to pull back a bit. In an interview with Jake Tapper, she claimed when she said “let’s eliminate all of that” she actually meant “let’s get rid of all the bureaucracy.”
But in reality, in the January town hall, Tapper had asked her specifically about her support for the Sanders bill: “I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance,” he said. “So people out there who like their insurance, they don’t get to keep it?”
In response, Harris said:
Listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through all the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of all us have not had that situation where you have to wait for approval and the doctor says, ‘Well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this’? Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.
By May, however, Harris was trying to get voters to ignore the original context of the question and direct everybody to the “paperwork” aspect to play it off as if she were merely proposing ending red tape. Nonetheless, this was widely seen as her attempt to walk away from her call to eliminate private insurance.
This is why it stood out in the June 27 debate, when candidates were asked, “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?” that she raised her hand alongside Sanders.
Yet as she did a victory lap in interviews after crushing Biden in the debate, Harris walked back the walk-back of her walk-back, claiming that she misunderstood the question to be about whether she would be willing to give up her own personal health insurance for a government-run plan.
To understand the next phase of Harris’s unraveling requires getting into the weeds a bit more about what was in the Sanders bill that she had proudly co-sponsored.
Specifically, under his legislation, when the government health-care plan became available in the fourth year following the law’s enactment, it would be illegal for any private insurer to sell or for any employer to offer coverage that includes benefits “that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.”
As she attempted to thread the needle, Harris tried to emphasize that this meant that private insurance wasn’t fully banned, because there would be an opening for “supplemental” insurance as long as it wasn’t duplicative. She pressed this point in her May interview with Tapper, and then again as she tried to mop up her debate answer. Right after the debate, she told NBC, “In my vision of Medicare for All, it includes private insurance where people can have supplemental insurance.”
Yet there was a problem with this argument. Anybody who read on to the next section of the Sanders bill would learn about its “comprehensive coverage,” which was sweeping. That is, the Sanders bill, in addition to expanding traditional medical benefits in existing Medicare, would add vision, dental, and hearing coverage to the government plan. That would lead to next to nothing for private insurers to be allowed to cover. In theory, insurers would be allowed to offer insurance for plastic surgery, but elective and unnecessary surgery is not something that insurers cover.
More to the point, the Sanders plan would have eliminated 180 million private insurance plans, including every single employer-based plan. For decades, workers have forgone salary increases to negotiate better health-care benefits, and Harris was proposing wiping them all away and attempting to claim that she technically didn’t want to eliminate private insurance because hey, people could always try to find a private insurer to cover face-lifts and liposuction.
Harris tried to push this line for weeks, and eventually CNN’s Kyung Lah pressed her on it, and she conceded there would be “very little” role for private coverage, “because almost everything will be covered” by the government plan.
The central dilemma that Harris had was that she wanted to get the progressive street cred from backing Medicare for All, but she didn’t like answering for the actual implications. Given that Barack Obama encountered major backlash when a few million individual plans were canceled and about $1 trillion of taxes were imposed by his national health-care plan, embracing the cancellation of all existing private plans for a proposal that would require tax hikes of roughly 34 times that amount was an obvious vulnerability.
As a last-ditch effort, Harris on July 29 posted on Medium, “My Plan For Medicare For All.” The exercise was mainly about producing a document she could tout as “Medicare for All” while also claiming to allow for private insurance and to avoid middle-class tax hikes.
But the details were deeply unserious.
Harris still proposed eliminating all existing private insurance policies but allowed for a ten-year transition period, rather than four years. Private insurers would be allowed to exist in theory, but their costs and profits would be determined by government regulators, who would also dictate every aspect of the benefits they offered. “At the end of the ten-year transition, every American will be a part of this new Medicare system,” the plan read.
Meanwhile, in place of Sanders’s punishing 4 percent payroll tax on those making above $29,000, Harris floated the terrible idea of taxing stock trades. Keep in mind that even with significant middle-class tax hikes, the menu of possible financing options presented by Sanders added up to about $16 trillion, which wouldn’t cover even half of the projected ten-year cost of his plan. Harris did not explain how her iteration of offering comprehensive health insurance to everybody could be paid for, let alone without punishing the middle class.
While the health-care debacle did not alone end Harris’s candidacy, it was indicative of the problems that ultimately doomed her. She aimed to position herself somewhere in between Biden and Sanders. But by the end, she alienated everybody. It also showed how Harris quickly collapsed in the face of actual scrutiny of her positions.
It’s no surprise, then, that in her current run for the White House, she has shown a reluctance to be interviewed and chosen to convey to the New York Times through “campaign officials” that she “no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program.” What’s clear is that given the experiences with her previous failed run, the last thing she wants to risk in this campaign is to sit down with anybody who would press to explain the details of her actual positions.