Medicare For All Should Be The Litmus Test For Democratic Candidates

There is no denying that Americans need a universal healthcare plan, and while we have the opportunity in the primaries, we need to force candidates to sign onto this idea. This is no time for half-measures or flip-flopping; People are dying because they don’t have healthcare or can’t afford their medicine, and we need to support candidates who are pledging to end this. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

I know liberals, Democrats and progressives, whatever we want to call ourselves at any given point of the day, we don't typically like litmus test, right? Or we do really have one good one that we kind of use as the standard for our candidates. Do you support a woman's right to choose? But even if they say no to that and they say, no, I'm a pro life Democrat, we still pretty much have the party kind of lining up behind them anyway. So that's not even really a litmus test. It should be, but it's not. See Republicans do have litmus test. You know, you watch their campaigns when they've got a heated primary. They'll go after their opponent and say, this guy thinks maybe we ought to get our assault weapons off the streets. He doesn't think you should have your second amendment rights. They attack one another to the point where they forced them all on the same page. It's a horrible page, but they make sure everybody gets on it. Meanwhile, here over here on the left, we've got some great pages. We've got a page for a woman's right to choose. We've got a page for LGBTQ rights, which means treating them like every other human being. And we've got a new page that came up just recently in this campaign and that is a page for Medicare for all. And I firmly believe that Medicare for all should be a litmus test for all democratic candidates seeking the office of the presidency. And I say, if you don't support Medicare for all, then I don't care what else you have to say. You're done. You're out, you're gone. You don't exist in my book. And here's why. I know Medicare for all is some kind of lofty promise. Oh my God, it's crazy. How could we do it? Well, the same way all the other countries who have it do it. Oh my God, how do we pay for it? I don't know. Pick one of the very many plans out there that have been clearly laid out on how to pay for it. Elizabeth Warren's got one. Bernie Sanders has one. I have actually laid out my own plan on how you pay for this. It ain't that hard really. So you pick one of those. But when we see these Democrats who go out there and they use these industry funded talking points to attack Medicare for all, you're done. The health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and hospital corporations have priced people out of health care here in the United States. They are essentially accomplices in the murder of people who die every day because they can't afford their medication. They can't afford to go to the doctor. They can't afford to go to the hospital and they die. And these industries are accomplices in those deaths. So I will not listen to any politician that goes out there and parrots the same talking points that those groups are putting out because you're siding with the murderers, you're siding with the people who would rather watch us die then to actually do what their job should be, which is to make sure we can go to the doctor to make sure we can walk into the pharmacy and afford our medications. Me personally, recently I had to stop taking my steroid inhaler to control my asthma. I'm not on it anymore because I can't afford it anymore and I can't afford it anymore because I had to take all the money I had saved up to renew my kids EpiPen prescriptions, which just cost me $1,300 cause I have two kids with peanut allergies and they're different ages. They're different sizes. So even though the epi pack comes with too, I can't use it on the younger one because it could kill her. So I have to get her her smaller one, 650 a pop up. So in order to get them their medicine, I had to forgo

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