KamalaCare: Harris backed ‘Medicare for All’ and abolishing private insurance

Vice President Kamala Harris ’s past support for "Medicare for All " places her well to the left of President Joe Biden and is likely to prove a liability for her as she seeks to win the 2024 presidential race .

As senator from California, Harris supported Sen. Bernie Sanders ’s (I-VT) Medicare for All plan, which would have had the federal government provide all healthcare services as well as eliminate any role for private insurance.

Harris also during a June 2019 debate , six months into her 2020 presidential candidacy, endorsed the idea of abolishing all private health insurance, although she later tried to walk back her remarks as a statement about her personal preference rather than a policy position.

During the campaign, then-candidate Biden pushed back against both Harris and Sanders in their progressive policy and instead took the more centrist approach of protecting Obamacare from Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” it.

Although her record on abolishing private insurance will likely be a heavy liability to overcome, Harris may choose to revive her own Medicare for All plan, published in July 2019, that would attempt to carve out a sliver of room for some private insurance market.

Harris’s original plan for Medicare for All intended to “cover all medically necessary services,” from emergency room visits to vision and dental care.

The plan also would have allowed for the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate prescription drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies — a policy that was later rolled into the healthcare provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act for drugs covered by Medicare.

But several problems with the so-called KamalaCare plan drew ire from progressive and centrist factions of the Democratic Party.

The plan’s 10-year phase-in period, which was intended to lower costs and make implementation more feasible, was criticized as impracticable.

“We think that four years is as long as it should be, not 10 years,” Sanders told CNN in 2019, critiquing Harris’s plan.

In an apparent attempt to offer a third way between Obamacare and Sanders’s complete abolition of private insurance, KamalaCare as proposed would have allowed some room for private insurance plans under tighter regulation from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Essentially, we would allow private insurance to offer a plan in the Medicare system, but they will be subject to strict requirements to ensure it lowers costs and expands services,” Harris wrote at the time. “If they want to play by our rules, they can be in the system. If not, they have to get out."

The suggestion of letting private insurance companies into a Medicare-based system generated significant criticism from within the party, including from Sanders.

“What Medicare for All understands,” Sanders said at the time, “is that healthcare is a human right and the function of a sane healthcare system is not to make sure that insurance companies and drug companies make tens of billions of dollars in profit.”

Harris's past stance on healthcare places her well to the left of Biden. And her debate comment about abolishing private insurance is sure to feature in GOP ads.

Most people, even a sizable portion of Democrats, say there is some role for private insurance in the healthcare market.

A 2019 poll conducted around the time KamalaCare was introduced found that only one in 10 registered voters wanted an equivalent of Medicare for All if it required abolishing all private health insurance plans. In the same poll, 32% of voters desired a universal government-operated system that would have room for private supplemental insurance.

Four years later in 2023, following the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Gallup poll found that, although 57% of Americans believed that the government should ensure healthcare for all in the U.S., 53% favored a system based on private insurance.

This even held true for partisans, with 26% of Democrats and 50% of Independents preferring a “system mostly based on private health insurance.”

The popularity of Medicare Advantage plans, or private supplemental insurance for seniors on Medicare, is highly indicative of Americans’s support for some role for private health insurance even within a nationalized system. Medicare Advantage enrollment has more than doubled since 2010, accounting for 54% of the Medicare-eligible population in 2024.