Abdul el Sayed’s government-run healthcare lie

In a recent podcast interview, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed sought to reassure voters about his healthcare stance. He’s a supporter of government-run single-payer healthcare, which would cost more than $3 trillion every single year, according to nonpartisan and even left-leaning estimates. That’s on top of existing federal spending, which is already running trillions in the red annually. The national debt is climbing toward $41 trillion. There is no pathway toward funding such a giant new program beyond enormous and across-the-board tax increases on every income group in the country. It’s so wildly unaffordable that even several of the deepest blue states in the country, such as Vermont and California, have abandoned the goal, despite their leftist elected officials possessing a strong political will to get it done. The math simply does not work. Americans are not willing to bear the brunt of massive tax hikes to fund a government takeover of their healthcare system. Single-payer healthcare famously stifles innovation and inevitably triggers deep government rationing — the consequences of which have become dystopian in places like Canada. Perhaps most disruptive, the imposition of a government-supremacist scheme would rip existing healthcare arrangements away from almost 200 million Americans, the large majority of which are satisfactory to those individuals and families, according to numerous polls and analyses. Former President Barack Obama told what was eventually labeled the “lie of the year” by Democrat-aligned “fact-checker” Politifact when he claimed that under Obamacare, impacted Americans could keep their plans and doctors. That assertion crumbled under the weight of reality, and millions of people lost access to their preferred plans and physicians. It was a major betrayal. Under “Medicare for all,” the Left’s label for its policy, the displacement would be orders of magnitude greater than what Obamacare inflicted. Private plans would become entirely or functionally illegal, and every person would be swallowed up by, and funneled into, the new government-run regime. It’s worth noting that regular, non-expanded Medicare is already on a fast path to insolvency. Federal actuaries have been raising this red flag for years, and the fiscal clock is ticking loudly. And that’s without swelling the program to cover (or try to cover) hundreds of millions of additional Americans. The public likes the sound of “universal healthcare.” It absolutely does not like the idea of punishing tax increases to create a rationing-riddled government system that takes away arrangements it’s broadly accustomed to and satisfied with. Which is why Abdul el Sayed, who has misleadingly claimed to be a doctor, is lying to voters right now. Just before the election, he’s telling Michiganders that under his plan, “If you would like to have a private insurer, you’re welcome to do that.”That’s not true, according to… Abdul el Sayed. Roll the tape.“‘Medicare for all’ guarantees you a public healthcare plan and eliminates your private one,” he said in 2019 (after his unsuccessful run for governor), adding, “Under ‘Medicare for all,’ the federal government is the only payer — hence single payer — for healthcare to everybody in the nation.” In 2020, he boasted that under his vision, “the only insurer in town is Medicare.” Does that mean that private insurance would go away? Yes.He’s said so himself: “What ‘Medicare for all’ does is it does away with the private insurance market. It now has one single payer … and that is the government of the United States.” Abdul el Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, attends a service at First Baptist Institutional Church on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) In 2021 he said the scheme was designed to “collectivize” the system, later arguing that private healthcare “should not exist.” Leftists often try to soften or sidestep the accurate conservative framing of single-payer healthcare as a government takeover. But el Sayed confirms it. During the previous midterm election cycle, he announced, “I advocate for a government takeover of health insurance because health insurance offers no value in the American healthcare system.”That’s not subtle. He believes in the federal government intervening to end private healthcare and take over the entire system. He may believe that private coverage “offers no value” to anyone, but tens of millions of Americans disagree. They find great value in their plans and doctors, and they don’t want to sacrifice those things on the altar of a statist power grab that puts notoriously incompetent government bureaucrats in charge of their extremely personal and high-stakes care. People like el Sayed think they know better. Now that he’s trying to get across the finish line in November, he’s changing his tune about what he believes. But his policy hasn’t changed. He’s simply lying about it. A recent New York Times poll gives the Democrat a slight edge in the race against mainstream Republican Mike Rogers. His single biggest issue advantage over Rogers in that survey is on healthcare (+24). Do voters have any idea what his policies would actually do to them on that front? Someone had better let them know.In other recent interviews, el Sayed has also been saying other strange and false things. He told former NBC anchor Chuck Todd that he’d be willing to appear on Bill Maher’s HBO program, despite all the “terrible things” the host has supposedly said “about people like me.” Lest there was any ambiguity about what he was referring to, el Sayed said he would like to give viewers “the image of watching him get his ass whooped on his own show by a guy who prays like I do.” There’s the Islamophobia card again. It must be pointed out that el Sayed invited a close friend and campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker, to come to Michigan and campaign alongside him. Piker has said America deserved 9/11, averred that our country compares unfavorably to al Qaeda, and has reveled in the deaths of American servicemembers — all while outwardly praising our enemies and various terrorist organizations. Is noticing these things a form of bigotry against close associates who “pray like” el Sayed does? El Sayed, by the way, brazenly lied about the number of campaign events he did with his pro-terrorist, overtly America-hating invited guest. He has publicly refused to disavow Piker’s vile views.Hot on the heels of notably declining to condemn the blood-drenched “death to America” regime in Iran — and to stand with the anti-regime people of Iran, who’ve been slaughtered by the tens of thousands — el Sayed has demonstrated a near-bottomless appetite for talking about his anti-Israel-first obsession.On a New York Times podcast, el Sayed claimed the world’s lone Jewish state is the obstacle standing in the way of a Palestinian state. Of course, as former President Bill Clinton and others have chronicled on several occasions, Israel has repeatedly said yes to various peace deals, including extremely generous ones for the Palestinians. It’s el Sayed’s side in this conflict that has said “No” every single time, typically accompanied by violence against Israeli civilians. The Jewish state has agreed to peace, making major concessions, multiple times. Palestinian leaders have rejected them at every opportunity. For this, el Sayed blames Israel, of course, and seeks to punish the Jewish state via U.S. foreign policy.A final flashback from el Sayed’s radical, not-so-distant past: During his failed 2018 gubernatorial run, he called for repealing a state law that criminalizes knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV. Failure to disclose an HIV-positive status to a partner, which seems like a very significant factor in informed consent, was criminalized under the law el Sayed wanted to undo.“You should not be criminalized for a disease,” he said, calling the policy “hateful” and “discriminatory.” But the law doesn’t criminalize people for having a disease. The issue at hand is whether they should be allowed to knowingly expose other, unwitting people to that disease without telling them. Does the “my body, my choice” ethos not apply to sexual partners as they weigh consenting to sexual activity? El Sayed thinks it’s bigotry to protect HIV-negative people from intentional exposure. TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY STARES DOWN AN EARLY ENDHe’s reportedly standing by that position. He also thinks that people infected with that, or any, disease should be forced into government-run healthcare. He’s made crystal clear, over and over again, that private insurance would be abolished under his proposal. But weeks away from the election, he’s pretending otherwise.