Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Candidates divided by health care
Democratic hopefuls weigh in on mass shootings, education, student debt
HOUSTON — The leading Democratic presidential candidates split sharply over the issue of health care in a debate Thursday night, exposing the gulf between former Vice President Joe Biden’s careful moderate politics and the transformational liberal ambitions of Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Biden, facing all of his closest competitors for the first time in a debate, quickly took the initiative to challenge Warren and Sanders for supporting a “Medicare for All”-style health care system that would displace the existing forms of private insurance. Cloaking himself in the accomplishments of the Obama administration, Biden branded Warren as seeking to upend the progress of the Affordable Care Act.
“I know the senator says she’s with Bernie — well, I’m for Barack,” Biden jabbed, attacking the cost of a single-payer program: “How are we going to pay for it?”
Warren and Sanders, flanking Biden onstage, pushed back in tandem, dismissing Biden’s criticism and promising that a government-managed health insurance system would ultimately be less
expensive for consumers than the private insurance they currently buy. Warren credited former President Barack Obama with having “fundamentally transformed health care in America” but said the country needed to go further.
“The richest individuals and the biggest corporations are going to pay more, and middle- class families are going to pay less,” she said.
But asked twice by a moderator whether she would acknowledge that the taxes of middle-income Americans would go up under her proposal, she declined to respond directly.
In a tart exchange that channeled their philosophical differences, Sanders held up Canada as a country that provided universal coverage for a lower total cost, prompting Biden to jump in: “This is America.”
Sanders f ired back: “Americans don’t want to pay twice as much as other countries.”
The remaining field of candidates at the event hosted by historically black Texas Southern University arrayed themselves around the same philosophical dividing line, most of them aligning more closely with Biden. And for the first time in this primary race, a handful of the trailing contenders sharpened their attacks.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota derided Sanders’ single- payer bill as a “bad idea,” while Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., accused Sanders and Warren of seeking to take away choice from consumers.
“I trust the American people to make the right choice for them,” Buttigieg said. “Why don’t you?”
A harshly contentious clash between Biden and Julian Castro, the former federal housing secretary, stood out the most from the early exchanges of the evening. Seizing on a moment in which Biden appeared to reverse his own description of his health care proposals, Castro questioned Biden’s memory — a charged subject for the 76- year- old Democratic front-runner.
“Are you forgetting already what you said two minutes ago?” Castro said, prodding insistently before boasting, “I’m fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama and you’re not.”
Biden shot back: “That would be a surprise to him.”
As the bickering grew more intense, Buttigieg interjected that voters would not like the attacks and attempts to “score points,” which he said prompted only more division.
“That’s called a Democratic primary election,” Castro interjected. “This is what we’re here for.”
Trying to stay above the fray was the candidate who unleashed one of the race’s toughest attacks at the first debate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California. Harris used her opening statement to speak directly to, and criticize, President Donald Trump and during the health care contretemps lamented that “not once have we talked about Donald Trump.”
All, in fact, did assail Trump during the evening. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker called Trump a racist. Former Texas U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke called him a white supremacist. And Harris said Trump’s hateful social media messages provided “the ammunition” for recent mass shootings.
“President Trump, you have spent the last 2½ years full time trying to sow hate and division among us, and that’s why we’ve gotten nothing done,” Harris declared. There was also consensus on the stage when it came to praising the leadership of O’Rourke in the aftermath of the mass shooting last month in El Paso, his hometown. And O’Rourke won a booming ovation from the Democratic audience when he was asked whether he would try to confiscate some weapons.
In an emotional moment, O’Rourke first said that there weren’t enough ambulances at times to take all the wounded to the hospital during last month’s rampage.
“Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR- 15, your AK-47,” he said. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against fellow Americans anymore.”
Booker, who lives in Newark, said the anger over gun violence was long overdue. “I’m sorry that it had to take issues coming to my neighborhood or personally affecting Beto to suddenly make us demand change,” he said. “This is a crisis of empathy in our nation. We are never going to solve this crisis if we have to wait for it to personally affect us or our neighborhood or our community before we demand action.”
Klobuchar noted that all the candidates on stage favor a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Candidates were also less divided over education issues.
Andrew Yang said he supports a mix of options, including charter schools, in trying to fix the nation’s education system. The entrepreneur also said that his proposed “Freedom Dividend” would help lower-income families support their children’s educational needs while assisting teachers already overburdened because many are going beyond classroom instruction to compensate for support some students aren’t getting at home.
Several candidates, including Buttigieg, Harris and Warren, advocated raising teacher salaries — something Booker noted that “we actually did” while he was mayor of Newark.
Both Warren and Sanders promoted student debt cancellation plans. Harris, a graduate of a historically black university or college, noted her proposal to put $ 2 billion toward the institutions’ teacher training programs.
Several of the Democrats also said they would loosen restrictions on immigration put into place under the Trump administration.
Warren said she would expand pathways to citizenship, blaming current problems on the United States’ withdrawal of aid to Central America. She called it “a crisis that Donald Trump has created and hopes to profit from politically.”
Yang noted his status as the son of immigrants and called immigration “positive for our economic and social dynamism” and pledged to return immigration levels to those of the Obama administration.
Biden dismissed questions about the Obama administration’s record of deportations by touting the former Democratic president’s effort to open doors to immigrants.
Instead of answering whether the deportations were a mistake, Biden noted Obama’s support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally.