The Sanders presidential campaign, in its statement, detailed the key priorities of his proposal, which will be released sometime in the next month:
- Cancel the $81 billion in existing past-due medical debt. Under this plan, the federal government will negotiate and pay off past-due medical bills in collections that have been reported to credit agencies.
- Repeal the worst elements of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, and allow other existing and future medical debt to be discharged.
- Make sure that no one’s credit score is negatively impacted by unpaid medical bills.
“The 2005 bankruptcy reform bill written by Wall Street made it much more difficult to discharge medical debt by imposing strict means tests and eliminated fundamental consumer protections for the American people,” the campaign noted. “It also trapped families with medical debt in long-term poverty, mandated that they pay for credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy, and increased the need for expensive legal services when filing a case for medical bankruptcy.”
A longtime single-payer advocate and lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2019 in the Senate, Sanders has made addressing the nation’s high healthcare costs a top issue in his bid to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the 2020 race.
Other nations do it better, in a more fair and less stressful way of treating their publics. Ask yourself, why does Congress and the lobbyist class and the wealthy holding actual power in the nation want you to live under stress? You are more pliant, is why, and the medical industrial complex wants to prosper excessively out of your ills as much as they can. In hospitals the bean counters on the bottom floor control access, (terms and conditions), and the top floor medical specialists are fine with that, getting their share of the spoils.
We can do better. We should do better. Who has to have things changed to fix things better? Figure that out. Bernie has.