'The View' co-host presses Bernie Sanders on 'Medicare-for-all' wait times amid coronavirus pandemic

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"The View" guest co-host Sara Haines challenged Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Wednesday, asking him about the potential wait times that his "Medicare-for-all" program would create during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sanders had touted his plan as a way to maintain health insurance coverage for people who lost their jobs during the ongoing crisis. He added that the U.S. faced a shortage of supplies despite relativey high per capita spending on health care.

"That doesn't sound like a strong public health system, the likes of which we should have," Sanders said.

"Just to push back on that a little bit," Haines replied. "[People in] Countries with universal health care routinely have to wait longer and sometimes die before receiving many of the medical treatments." She added that the coronavirus was not something people "can wait on health care for."

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Sanders said he didn't accept the basic premise of Haines' argument.

"In many, many instances, other countries, for normal procedures, get health care a lot more rapidly than we do in this country," he said.

"We have areas in America right now, in rural areas for example, where you don’t have the kind of doctors you should, where hospitals are being closed down," Sanders went on. "We are paying far more for prescription drugs than other people in any other country -- in some cases, ten times more because we don't negotiate prices for prescription drugs."

"So, I don’t accept the basic premise of your argument," Sanders added. "I think the truth is that in Canada and other countries around the world, their health care systems are far more popular than our system is because the function of our system, to be honest, is to make billions of dollars in profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies, not to provide quality care to all people."

Co-host Sunny Hostin asked Sanders about criticism that he was politicizing the pandemic by using it to push his sweeping health care reform.

"Should we put politics aside and all come together? Of course, we should," Sanders said. "And when we all come together, it seems to me we have to do several things. One of them is guarantee health care to all people, right now."

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"The absurdity that you may be diagnosed with the coronavirus and you go into the hospital, and you spend thousands of dollars getting treated, and maybe, God willing, you come out alive, but you got a huge bill out there. He added that hundreds of thousands of people went bankrupt every year because of medically-related bills. Especially during the coronavirus crisis, Sanders said, peope should not have to worry about the cost of health care.

"They should not have to worry about whether they can afford prescription drugs or not. They should not have to worry whether the pharmaceutical industry is going to make billions of dollars by creating a vaccine that will be unaffordable to ordinary people. It must be free to all," he said.