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Which health care strategy has the edge among Democrats and swing voters?

The latest Tracking Poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they want to hear the candidates discuss health care.

  • By Julie Rovner/Kaiser Health News
People with National Nurses United march in support of medicare for all, outside of the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, where a Democratic presidential debate is taking place, Wednesday, June 26, 2019, in Miami.

 Lynne Sladky / AP Photo

People with National Nurses United march in support of medicare for all, outside of the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, where a Democratic presidential debate is taking place, Wednesday, June 26, 2019, in Miami.

(Washington) — The one thing we know about health care in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race is that it’s a top issue for voters.

The latest Tracking Poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation in late November found 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they want to hear the candidates discuss health care. That’s twice the total for the next top issue, climate change; and four times the total for immigration, the No. 3 issue.

The big question, though, is whether that interest will reward a candidate who backs a sweeping, “Medicare for All”-type plan, or, instead, a more modest plan like a public option, in which a person can voluntarily join a government health insurance plan, if they choose to.

Andrew Harnik / AP Photo

Families affected by pre-existing conditions attend a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 26, 2018.

Polling doesn’t make that clear. On the one hand, Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents in the KFF poll say when it comes to health care, the candidate they trust most is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (who has been pushing a Medicare for All plan since at least 1993).

Yet those same people say they prefer a public option (of the sort supported by former Vice President Joe Biden) to Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

That voter preference for the public option strategy was borne out in a separate Quinnipiac poll released last week, in which 36% of respondents say Medicare for All is a good idea while 52% say it is a bad idea. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from September found similar results: 67% of respondents said they would support allowing people under age 65 to “buy their health coverage through the Medicare program,” while only 41% favored “adopting Medicare for All, a single-payer health care system in which private health insurance would be eliminated.”

So, what the candidates now face is a question of strategy and tactics.

Sanders is all-in on Medicare for All. “I wrote the damn bill,” he keeps reminding reporters. Biden and the rising-in-the-polls Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., are firmly in favor of a more moderate approach.

“We take a version of Medicare. We let you access it if you want to. And if you prefer to stay on your private plan, you can do that, too,” Buttigieg said at the Democrats’ October debate. “That is what most Americans want.”

 

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