Democratic presidential primary candidate and Senator Kamala Harris told CNN that she would be “opposed to any policy” that would deny health care under Medicare-for-All to any resident, legally here or not.
While giving an interview on Sunday with Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” Kamala Harris was pressed to speak about would she support a Medicare-for-All proposal that would extend coverage to “any resident,” including illegal immigrants in the U.S. Medicare-for-All is a program championed by her primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Kamala Harris responded by stating that she was “opposed to any policy” that would prevent a person in America — here legally or not — from using taxpayer-funded public health care.
“Let me just be very clear about this: I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health. Period.” said Harris.
Harris’s comments expand on her previous backing of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All proposal.
As previously reported, Harris declared her full backing of Medicare-for-All, clamming that health care in the U.S. was a “right,” not a “privilege.”
“What we know is that to live in a civil society, to be true to the ideals and the spirit of who we say we are as a country, we have to appreciate and understand that access to health care is a — should not be thought of as a privilege. It should be understood to be a right.” Harris said.
After she announced her backing of the plan, Dr. Marc Siegel spoke out against the proposal, criticizing it as a plan that could take “a wrecking ball to private insurance” and clamming that access to care would be worse under Medicare-for-All.