The ad warns that government-run health care of the kind preferred by Abdul El-Sayed leads to waitlists, drug rationing, and poor outcomes.
A new ad airing across Michigan implores voters to reject candidates who support single-payer health-care policies, warning that the same issues befalling European single-payer health-care systems could soon come to the United States through policies like Medicare-for-All touted by Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
The six-figure ad buy by Heartland Impact, first obtained by National Review, focuses on an issue that’s top-of-mind for Michigan voters, no matter their party affiliation.
El-Sayed has run unabashedly on a Medicare-for-all concept, while Republican Mike Rogers pushes more targeted, free-market reforms.
A recent poll by Healthier United, a bipartisan health policy nonprofit, showed deep divides among Michigan voters’ attitudes toward Medicare-for-All, which would abolish private insurance while guaranteeing universal health care backed by the federal government.
According to the poll, 85 percent of Michigan Democrats support the concept, while 58 percent of Republicans oppose it. Independents are nearly split — 51 percent support the proposal.
The ad, which does not name or show El-Sayed, warns that government-controlled health care abroad should serve as a cautionary tale for Americans given the waitlists, drug rationing, and poor patient outcomes that come with it.
The ad references year-long wait times and rationing done in the United Kingdom’s single-payer system.
“In the UK, nearly 80,000 people were removed from waitlists for healthcare in a single year because they died waiting in line. It’s even worse for accessing life-saving medicines and treatments,” the ad says.
El-Sayed has made health-care costs his central pitch to voters. “Medicare For All would allow us to actually provide every single person cradle-to-grave insurance without having to worry about losing it if you turn 26, if you get a job, lose a job, get married, get divorced, turn 65,” El-Sayed told Face The Nation in September.
El-Sayed, who has a medical degree but never worked as a medical doctor, co-authored Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide in 2021, a treatise on the single-payer system that would abolish access to private insurance. Democrat Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders penned a foreword for the book.
Sanders and Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined El-Sayed on the campaign trail during the democratic primary, securing the progressive bloc of primary voters to defeat Representative Haley Stevens, a more moderate democrat.
The ad portrays Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez as vehicles of a European-style healthcare system to come to the United States.
“The single-payer healthcare proposals being pushed by far-left politicians will only make healthcare affordability worse for Americans,” Heartland Impact Executive Director Cameron Sholty said. “Michiganders don’t want imported European-style healthcare, and they deserve better than the waitlists, drug rationing, and tax increases that will inevitably follow a government-run system.”
GOP Senate contender Mike Rogers has pushed back against El-Sayed’s sweeping proposals, pointing to the immense financial burden on Washington and the fallout from eliminating private plans, even as he acknowledges that rising medical costs throughout Michigan necessitate targeted fixes.
“The way we don’t [lower costs] is blow up the system that we have,” Rogers said at a health-care press conference in September. “We fix the system that we have.”