Democrats at event focus on health care
Candidates spar over changing system
LAS VEGAS — Democratic presidential candidates’ tussle over health care and President Barack Obama’s legacy continued Saturday, with former Vice President Joe Biden declaring he’s “against any Democrat who wants to get rid of Obamacare” and Sen. Kamala Harris saying no Democrat should be on the debate stage without a plan to cover everybody.
They spoke during a forum held by the nation’s largest public employees union in Nevada, the state that will cast the first votes in the West in next year’s primary. Biden and Harris were two of 19 Democratic hopefuls speaking before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 1.6 million workers nationwide.
Harris, who has introduced a version of “Medicare for All” that would allow closely regulated private plans, said she developed it in part by consulting with organized labor.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of folks in labor who have said to me, ‘Look, we negotiated contracts where we’ve given up wages for these health care benefits, and under the Medicare for All plan we would lose them or we would be certainly in fear of losing them,” she said.
Earlier in the day, Biden defended Obama’s health care overhaul law, saying that supporting it helped Democrats win key seats in the 2018 election.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who wrote a Medicare for All bill, said guaranteed government health care would allow unions to be free to “sit down and negotiate decent wage increases.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who also backs Medicare for All, tried to redirect attention to the efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to have federal courts declare the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
“When we talk about the great debate right now in health care, it’s not Democrats versus Democrats. It’s Democrats versus Republicans. Republicans want to take away health care from tens of millions of people in this country, and they’re actively still trying to do it,” Warren said.
Health care is one of the clearest dividing policy lines for the massive Democratic field, and one of several where Biden has tried to paint his rivals as criticizing Obama’s legacy.
Former Obama Cabinet secretary Julian Castro, who sparred with Biden over immigration in a recent debate, said it’s not an attack on Obama to acknowledge Democrats can do better on immigration and other issues. He said the Obama administration improved over time by decreasing the number of deportations but that Democrats should have made immigration changes a priority when they controlled Congress early in Obama’s presidency.
“There are lessons that we can learn,” Castro said. “This is not about criticizing President Obama, this is about ‘OK, what does the next administration have to do?’”
Beyond immigration and health care, candidates Saturday spoke to union workers about kitchen-table issues such as bolstering collective bargaining rights, raising the minimum wage and taxing the wealthy. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said he’d give people who work at home taking care of disabled family members a tax credit. Nearly every candidate pledged to put someone from organized labor in their Cabinet if elected.
The union has not decided if it will endorse in the Democratic primary but will take its time considering because they’ve “got a lot of friends in the race,” President Lee Saunders said.
The candidates packed in events around the Las Vegas area over the weekend in a nod to Nevada’s status as the third state where Democrats will vote in the primary, just after Iowa and New Hampshire and before South Carolina. Warren, speaking at a town hall Friday night in a high school gymnasium, said she’s expanding her footprint in Nevada and will soon have six campaign offices, more than any other candidate.
Despite Democrats largely sweeping the state in 2018, it remains a battleground where Trump sees a chance of winning next year. He lost the state in 2016 to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 2 percentage points.
Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock also spoke early Saturday, with remarks from Sen. Bernie Sanders and other contenders planned for the afternoon.
Candidates who spoke Saturday included: Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, billionaire activist Tom Steyer, author Marianne Williamson, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and former Reps. John Delaney of Maryland and Beto O’Rourke of Texas.