Sanders-endorsed Senate candidate knocked for alleged flip-flop to 'have it both ways' on key issue

A Democratic Senate candidate endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is being slammed for allegedly flip-flopping on one of his primary campaign issues.

Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate who previously ran an unsuccessful bid for Michigan governor, has made "Medicare-for-all" a hallmark of his Senate campaign.

However, as the Michigan Senate primary race heats up, El-Sayed's Democratic opponent, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, is accusing him of backing down from a full "Medicare-for-all" stance and of "rewriting definitions to have it both ways."

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Roxie Richner, an El-Sayed campaign spokesperson, responded by telling Fox News Digital, "Dr. El-Sayed is and has always been for 'Medicare-for-all' - guaranteed public health insurance for every American. Cradle to grave. No premiums, deductibles, or co-pays." 

"Dr. El-Sayed would be the first Democratic doctor elected to the U.S. Senate since 1969, and he looks forward to passing 'Medicare-for-all' into law," added Richner.

El-Sayed's campaign website page on "A Healthier America" cites a book he co-authored in 2021 in which he wrote that limiting private alternatives to "Medicare-for-all" would be important to ensuring providers accepted the insurance. The book advocates for "Medicare-for-all" as a type of "monopsony" in healthcare, in which there is only a single buyer of medical services, the government. 

"By insuring all Americans, M4A becomes a monopsony in healthcare. This is different from a monopoly, where there's only one seller of a good; in a monopsony there's only one buyer of a good. That gives the single buyer considerable negotiating leverage, which Medicare could use to rein in the cost of drugs, hospital stays, and physician services," the book reads. 

In a November post on X, El-Sayed explained that this monopsony "would instantaneously create a disciplining feature against rising prices," because it "takes out the profit motive on the payer end of the transaction." 

The book further states that "because alternatives to M4A [Medicare-for-all] would be limited, participation of providers would be virtually guaranteed." 

"Instead of spending time and money dealing with the arcane requirements of hundreds of different health plans […] providers could use one streamlined system that would free up resources to focus on clinical care," the books reads. 

The latest version of the federal "Medicare-for-all" Act, introduced in the Senate by Sanders, includes language that would effectively ban most comprehensive private insurance plans and relegate private insurers to providing limited supplemental care. 

The legislation would make it unlawful for "a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act."

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El-Sayed testified before the Senate in support of the "Medicare-for-all" Act in 2022, calling it "the clearest pathway to universal, durable healthcare insurance, bar none" and saying that "cradle to grave coverage would do away with the premiums, co pays, deductibles that leave even privately insured Americans rationing their healthcare today." 

The year before, in an interview with NerdWallet, El-Sayed said that under a "Medicare-for-all" plan, the government would be "buying you out" of your private insurance plan but would allow "a few insurance companies that offered a sort of concierge-level service for folks who wanted to pay for that."

In a 2024 episode of the "America Dissected" podcast, El-Sayed emphasized that "we don't really need private health insurance in this country."

He said that "private health insurance is a system by which you have a middleman in our healthcare system making a tremendous amount of money that is leading to a number of the biggest problems in American healthcare whether that's the fact that our costs continue to spiral upward, whether that's the fact that nearly ten million people in our country don't get health insurance at all, or it's the fact that we are consistently in this country, unable to guarantee, even people who are insurance access to the health care they need."

In October, El-Sayed knocked McMorrow for advocating for allowing a public option under universal healthcare, writing on X, "a public option can't deliver healthcare to every Michigander. Medicare for All can." Politico, in December, reported El-Sayed slamming McMorrow's call for universal healthcare with a public option as "incoherent."

"Now a public option is exactly that; it's just an option. There is no reason why it would actually address any of the foundational problems in our system. It wouldn't bring down the rising costs. It wouldn't guarantee people healthcare, and we don't really know how much it would cost," he said. 

Yet, while speaking on the Brian Tyler Cohen podcast in January, El-Sayed suggested that under "Medicare-for-all," "if you like your insurance from your employer or from your union, that can still be there for you."

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Days later, speaking on radio channel WDET, he again said, "'Medicare-for-all' is government health insurance guaranteed for everyone, regardless of what circumstances you're in. If you like your insurance through your employer or through your union, I hope that'll be there for you. But if you lose your job, if your factory shuts down, you shouldn't be destitute without the healthcare that you need and deserve." He also said, "If you have a public option, what happens is, the private health insurance system will try to dump all of the most expensive patients onto that public option, vastly increasing the cost of that public option and making it unsustainable." 

El-Sayed's campaign website states that he "believes in expanding Medicare to cover every single American from cradle to grave while sustaining the option for workers to keep supplemental private insurance their unions or employers may provide." Amid criticism from McMorrow, El-Sayed doubled down on his "Medicare-for-all" messaging in a January fundraising message, in which he wrote that "private insurance could supplement or duplicate Medicare."

Meanwhile, McMorrow has accused him of not being honest on "Medicare-for-all." 

"On an issue as important as healthcare, you have to be honest about what you're fighting for," McMorrow wrote in a public reply to El-Sayed, adding, "The 'Medicare-for-all' legislation that you've championed completely eliminates private health insurance as it exists today."

Sanders' office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.