Samantha Bee Lauds Bernie Sanders' 'Essential' Policy Ideas After He Leaves 2020 Race
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Wednesday — but Full Frontal host Samantha Bee tells PEOPLE Now the candidate’s progressive politics have “never been more essential.”
As the novel coronavirus pandemic threatens hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and around the world, Bee said on Thursday’s episode of PEOPLE Now that she believes Sanders’ long-championed push for universal healthcare has many people thinking twice in the U.S.
“The notion of that was so abstract in a lot of peoples’ minds until this exact moment,” Bee, 50, explained. “It’s understandable to me that he would drop out of the race, but I think that those ideas have never been more essential and we are all feeling that right now.”
Sanders’ consecutive presidential campaigns, in 2016 were 2020, were largely based around the 78-year-old candidate’s call for “Medicare for all”: a free, government-backed healthcare system supported by taxes and public funds rather than insurance that has to be paid for individually.
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John Lamparski/Getty; Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty From left: Samantha Bee and Sen. Bernie Sanders
“Listen, I’m from Canada so I’m all in on universal healthcare,” Bee, a Toronto native, said on PEOPLE Now.
“I think people are looking at these long periods of potential illness [from the coronavirus] and thinking, ‘Well, how do I manage? How could I be ill and have to pay an enormous hospital bill?’ ” Bee said. “None of these questions are resolved and it’s really scary, so I hope that we continue to talk about those ideas because we have to.”
As Sanders has long noted, numerous other developed countries have national healthcare, including France, Germany, Canada, Finland and Australia.
Sanders said Wednesday that he decided to suspend his 2020 presidential campaign, citing the growing deficit he faced in the votes compared with former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner.
Biden led Sanders by 303 delegates, according to NPR’s tracker. That was a disparity many observers, and eventually Sanders himself, understood as too large to overcome following a string of double-digit losses to Biden in Michigan, Minnesota, South Carolina and elsewhere.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Samantha Bee
Sanders told supporters this week that the campaign has “had a profound impact in changing our nation” before listing off a number of his political positions which have been more widely accepted in recent years — including free public college and increasing the minimum wage — as he’s become one of the most famous liberal lawmakers in the country.
He said that “if we don’t believe we are entitled to healthcare as a human right, we will never achieve universal healthcare” in the U.S.
“Few would deny that over the course of the past five years our movement has won the ideological struggle,” Sanders said. “It was not long ago that people considered these ideas radical and fringe. Today, they are mainstream ideas and many of them are already being implemented in cities and states across the country.”
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