Weird. I thought Abdul’s campaign promise was more money in your pocket. This sounds a lot like more money for the government,” Mike Rogers wrote on X.
Rogers, the pro-Trump, pro-oligarch, pro-corruption candidate that Republicans are running in the Michigan Senate race, was responding to a clip of Dr.
El-Sayed on NBC News in which he outlined his plan to tackle this nation’s healthcare crisis.
That plan, unlike Trump’s “concepts of a plan,” is incredibly well thought out and would vastly improve the lives of average Americans.
And no, it wouldn’t boil down to “more money for the government” but rather far less money for the parasitic insurance companies that Rogers defends.
“You know, some Americans worry, though, you can only make Medicare free and universal if you increase taxes.
So if you are elected and make this push, would you need to increase taxes?” NBC’s Kristen Welker asked El-Sayed.
“As I’ve said across this campaign, I am for taxing billionaires their wealth,” replied El-Sayed.
“What about people who make less than a billion and less than a million dollars, though, Dr.
El-Sayed?” pressed Welker.“What about people making less than a million dollars?”
“So for the average person and you look at your W-2, if you’re an employee who gets paid every two weeks or four weeks, after you pay your taxes, the next biggest check that comes off the top of your pay stub is to your health insurance company,” explained El-Sayed.
“So 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 healthcare that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job or turned 26 or got married or got divorced.
I think all of us would be a lot more interested in that kind of a system if we knew that our healthcare would be free at the point of care and would be free without having to worry about losing it in general.”
“So there’s an opportunity here, I think, to trade what we give to a big corporation who gets to decide who we get to see and who we don’t for a little bit more paid into FICA,” he continued.
“And I think that’s a trade that’s worth making.I think the broader public understands that that’s a trade worth making considering how many people are holding medical debt, a third of all Michigan households right now.”
Welker — who like all mainstream media news anchors ultimately serves the interests of big corporations — pushed back and asked El-Sayed to “acknowledge that people making less than $1 million could see their taxes go up.”
“I’m saying that we’d be paying for healthcare in a different way,” said El-Sayed.
“Instead of paying a health insurance company whose CEO makes $20 million, I would much rather pay for durable health care into a government, which, of course, we all know provides healthcare for seniors who need healthcare the most.So if I’m trading paying a CEO to make more money or paying a government to guarantee me healthcare, I’m picking the latter every time.”
This is exactly the kind of nuanced, solution-based approach that Republicans despise.
They don’t actually want to solve problems, so they try to boil everything to simple, low IQ soundbites.Mike Rogers pounced on this clip and tried to do exactly that, fearmongering over the suggestion of slightly higher taxes.
But if Americans end up paying more in taxes but less money for health insurance, they end up with more money in their pockets.
At the same time, they’ll receive healthcare that can’t be yanked away when they lose their jobs and doesn’t send them into financial ruin.
El-Sayed, proving once again that he’s not one to tussle with lightly, responded to Rogers on X—
“I know it’s complicated for you, habibi.
I’m happy to teach you how this works at our next debate…if you’re not too much a coward to debate me,” he wrote.
The use of the Arabic “habibi,” a term of endearment that can mean “my dear” or “my bro,” is a particularly funny bit of tongue-in-cheek teasing since Republicans have gone all-in on their Islamophobic attacks on El-Sayed.
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