I have to say I haven't been too enthralled by any of the large crew of potential Democratic candidates for president... and then I watched Kamala Harris's town hall.
Up until then, my only feelings were that the three B's shouldn't run: Biden (too old, too clueless), Bernie (too old, his time was 2016 not now — and I was a Bernie supporter in 2016), and Beto (not yet, needs more experience).
But Harris was terrific all around.
I was especially impressed by her fearless take on Medicare For All:
Q: What is your solution to ensure people have access to quality healthcare at an affordable price, and does that solution involve cutting insurance companies as we know them out of the equation?
KH: I believe the solution — and I feel very strongly about this — is we need to have Medicare For All. That's just the bottom line...
What we know is that to live in a civil society, to be true to the ideals and spirit of who we say we are as a country, we have to appreciate and understand that access to health care should not be thought of as a privilege. It should be understood to be a right. It should be understood to be something that all people should be entitled to so that they can live a productive life, so they can have dignity.
And having a system that makes a difference in terms of who receives what based on your income is unconscionable, it's cruel and in many situations I've witnessed, inhumane....
It's inhumane to make people go through a system where they cannot receive the benefits of what medical science can offer because some insurance company has decided it doesn't meet their bottom line in terms of their profit motivation. That is inhumane.
Q [Jake Tapper]: So for people who like their insurance, they don't get to keep it?
KH: Look, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all the delay that may require... Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on.
It was so refreshing to hear someone in the upper reaches of American politics who actually understands single-payer health insurance. Too many supporters sound like they support it in a theoretical way but are tentative about talking about how it would actually operate from the user’s point of view, because they can't actually imagine something so different from the current terrible reality.
Harris talks about it as if she understands what that lived reality would be and sees that it's clearly superior to the insurance-company driven status quo.
I wondered how that can be, so I checked out her wikipedia page and found the answer.
She can talk about the lived reality of Medicare For All, a single-payer health care system, because she HAS lived the reality.
She grew up in Montreal, Quebec, from the age of 12, when her mother moved the family there to take a research position at McGill University, until she returned to the US for university. Canadian Medicare had been implemented in Quebec about seven years before Kamala Harris and her mother and sister arrived there.
So during her formative teen years she experienced Canadian Medicare and its simplicity of just go to the doctor if you need to — no wrangling with insurance companies for permission before or payment after.
And this is no late conversion for her on the topic just for the 2020 race — she was one of the co-sponsors of Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All bill back in mid-2017.
There may be other great candidates yet to jump in the race, but so far Kamala Harris is, to my mind, way out in front because of her leadership on Medicare For All.