If you’re into Bernie Sanders, you can’t beat this C-SPAN archival video of him debating future House speakers John Boehner and Dennis Hastert on the merits of a single-payer health-care system.
Flashback: Watch Bernie Sanders debate John Boehner on single-payer health care in ‘93
The date of the debate, which was a Lincoln-Douglas-inspired “special order” on the House floor: November 3, 1993.
Back then, Hillary Clinton was putting together a health-care plan that was derided by Republicans as “Hillarycare” and was doomed to fail. It would not have created the single-payer system that Sanders advocates for now, as he did then.
“How has it happened that the US today, along with South Africa, remains the only industrialized nation on Earth that does not have a national health-care system guaranteeing health care to all people?” he said in 1993. “I’ll tell you how it has happened. It has happened not because of debate over health care; it’s a debate over economics. It’s a debate over the insurance companies, certain physicians, the pharmaceutical companies, the medical equipment suppliers who are making billions and billions of dollars off of human misery.”
While many Democrats took a break from health-care talk after the fight over the Affordable Care Act, Sanders has continued to push for a single-payer system.
