"The idea [that] middle class taxes aren't going to go up is just crazy," Biden added.
Sanders responded that the "status quo" offered by Biden will cost even more. "We are spending twice as much per capita as the people of any other country," Sanders told Biden, who was vice president during the passage of the Affordable Care Act championed by President Barack Obama. "Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the health care industry last year made $100 billion in profit."
Sen. Bernie SANDERS: Medicare For All will cost substantially less than the status quo. Medicare For All will end the absurdity of paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and health care, while we have 87 million uninsured and underinsured. Under Medicare For All, one of the provisions we have to pay for it is a 4% tax on income, exempting the first $29,000. So the average family in America that makes $60,000 would pay $1,200 a year, compared to that family paying $12,000 a year.
Whether to pursue major health care reform in the first year had been a furious topic of debate going back to the transition. Rahm believed that pushing something too big on health care in 2009 was a mistake.
Joe Biden was on Rahm's side. He said during the transition that the Americans he and Obama had met on the campaign trail would understand if health care reform had to be delayed because the government was busy avoiding a depression. "They'll give you a pass on this one," he told the president. Anyone who knew Congress understood that getting a bipartisan bill would be difficult amid so much economic wreckage.
BIDEN: Not back then. From March on, I stopped doing big meetings, I started wearing masks. The head of the CDC said, "While we're waiting for a vaccine"--he held up a mask--"You wear this mask, you'll save more lives between now and the end of the year than if we had a vaccine." If we wore masks, we could save 100,000 lives. And what's Trump doing? Nothing. He's still not wearing masks.
Q [to TRUMP]: At White House events, people were not wearing masks.
TRUMP: Well, they do a lot of testing in the White House. I'm okay with masks. I tell people, "wear a mask." But just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.
Q: It didn't say that. I know that study.
TRUMP: That's what I heard. Hey, I'm President. I have to be out.
Q: You can see people with a mask, though.
TRUMP: I can, but people with masks are catching it all the time.
You should get out of your bunker and get out of the sand trap in your golf course and go in the Oval Office and bring together the Democrats and Republicans and fund what needs to be done now to save lives.
BIDEN: Do you believe for a moment what he's telling you in light of all the lies he's told you about the whole issue relating to COVID? He still hasn't even acknowledged that he knew this was happening, knew how dangerous it was going to be back in February, and he didn't even tell you. He's on record as saying it. He panicked or he just looked at the stock market. One of the two. Because guess what? A lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot quicker.
PALIN: He’s proposing a $5,000 tax credit for families so they can purchase their own health care coverage. That’s budget neutral. That doesn’t cost the government anything as opposed t Barack Obama’s plan to mandate health care coverage and have a universal government-run program.
BIDEN: McCain’s health care plan, you know, it’s with one hand you giveth, the other you taketh. You know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit a family will get? He taxes as income every one of you who has a health care plan through your employer. That’s how he raises $3.6 trillion: taxing your health care benefit, which his website points out will go straight to the insurance company. Then you’re going to have to replace the plan you get through your employer--on average it costs $12,000--you have to replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the “Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere.