The health care battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders intensified Wednesday when a national union ripped Clinton for her criticism of Sanders’s plan.
In Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Sanders contrasted his plan for a national, single-payer health insurance plan with a more incremental approach from Clinton. And as the work week opened, Clinton’s camp struck back, saying Sanders’s plan would require large tax hikes for the middle class.
The Clinton attack didn’t sit well with National Nurses United, a union of health care workers that had already announced its endorsement of Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primary.
“Any politician that refuses to finance guaranteed health care has abandoned my patients, and I will never abandon my patients. That’s why we support improved Medicare for all, and that’s why I support Bernie Sanders,” said Jean Ross, copresident of National Nurses United. “While the Affordable Care Act corrected some of the worst injustices in our insurance, profit-based health care system, the work of health care reform is far from done.”
Clinton’s camp argues that Sanders’s plan would hurt middle-class Americans because of the taxes needed to fund it. “Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. “If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.”