Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed claimed that slavery “profoundly” influenced the American health care system and that any public opposition to taxpayer-funded treatments for illegal immigrants would be a “deliberate, racist attack.”
In a resurfaced 2022 interview, the doctor claimed slavery still weighs on America’s for-profit health care.
“Racism continues to flummox our capacity as a society to invest in collective public goods” and remains “more powerful than the self-interest of … lower income white folks … in legacy confederacy states,” he said.
The Michigan Democrat, who ran a failed campaign for governor of his state in 2018, went on to assert that “structural racism” was one of the main reasons the US hasn’t passed Medicare for All or another universal, government-run health care system.
“Because in this country we have a privatized, partitioned health insurance system, the value of providing care, the reimbursement of providing care to different people’s bodies, differs based on how much money they make,” El-Sayed added.
“And how much money they make because of structural racism differs based on the color of their skin,” he said.
El-Sayed also claimed black bodies are valued at a lower rate than white children in US heatlhcare.
Opposition to Medicare for All is driven by “Reagan-esque trope[s]” and concerns about the care “being unearned,” El-Sayed said in the 2022 video.
El-Sayed, who has called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, expressed support for taxpayers paying for illegal immigrants to get healthcare.
“They’ll use examples of, you know, people who … are undocumented immigrants to this country,” he added, “and they’ll say, well, you know, your health care monies are going to pay for those undocumented folks — which will be a deliberate, racist attack.”
Reps for El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He’s locked in a tight race for US Senate against former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers.
The remarks come after El-Sayed deleted other past videos from his YouTube channel in which he said that Fourth of July “fireworks suck,” doubted that American football was “ethical” and suggested the Second Amendment right to bear arms should be done away with.
But the candidate has still refused to disavow commentator Hasan Piker, with whom he campaigned during the Democratic primary, over the far-left streamer’s remark in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” which Piker has since walked back.
And he’s distanced himself from the Democratic Socialists of America — despite having been supported by prominent democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do rather than this idea that we’re so stuck in cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad idea back in 2020,” El-Sayed said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month.
In the same interview, the candidate also defended the potentially $3.5 trillion annual price tag of Medicare for All — and expressed support for middle-class Americans footing the bill.
“Imagine instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20 million a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for health care that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job or turned 26 or got married or got divorced,” El-Sayed said. “I think that’s a trade that’s worth making.”
The Senate Democratic hopeful is holding a narrow 1.8 percentage point lead over Rogers, his GOP challenger, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
