WINOOSKI — Bernie Sanders is a regular sight on the campaign trail — just not much in his home state. On Thursday, though, Vermont’s independent U.S. senator stood alongside Amanda Janoo and voiced support for the gubernatorial candidate’s proposal to offer primary healthcare to everyone in the state, free of charge.
“I think Amanda’s desire to bring, among other things, universal primary care to the state of Vermont is exactly what we need,” Sanders said in a press conference outside the Community Health Centers of Burlington clinic in Winooski. If she can do it, he added, it would be “an extraordinary achievement.”
Sanders endorsed Janoo, the Democratic and Progressive parties’ nominee, over Republican Gov. Phil Scott earlier this month. The senator and former Burlington mayor had not endorsed a Scott challenger since backing David Zuckerman in 2020. It’s even rarer, though, for Sanders to make a campaign appearance alongside a state-level candidate for office in Vermont, as he did Thursday.
None of the previous Scott challengers Sanders has endorsed, of course, have won. That includes Sue Minter in 2016 and Christine Hallquist in 2018. But Sanders told reporters Thursday that Janoo has so far been doing everything right.
“She is a progressive candidate who’s reaching out to working class people and in a variety of ways, I think, fills the agenda of what a strong, progressive governor can do,” he said.
Sanders has devoted much of his time in the leadup to the Nov. 3 election traveling around the country to drum up support for Democratic and progressive candidates. He was in Houston on Tuesday to rally support for Texas Democrats and was in Florida days before with that state’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Angie Nixon.
Next month’s contests will be “the most important midterm election in the history of the United States,” Sanders said Thursday.
Janoo has proposed paying for universal primary care by raising income taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents. She’s cited modeling from the Fair Share for Vermont campaign that found that a 2% tax surcharge on personal income above $250,000 and an 8% surcharge on personal income over $500,000 could raise $344 million in annual state revenue.
Scott, for his part, has expressed skepticism about the viability of a universal primary care system though has not ruled out the idea entirely. The five-term governor has said he favors healthcare policy changes that reduce government regulations, such as an executive order he signed in July allowing insurers to price premiums partially based on age.
Janoo says details of how her plan would work, and exactly what services it would include, would need to be hashed out after she gets into office and has access to the resources of the state government. At Thursday’s press conference, she said that “the nice thing about the program I’m proposing is that it’s very scalable” and that she would be OK starting with piloting just a handful of publicly funded primary care doctors in certain cities and towns.
“We want to make sure that we are doing, like, a proper design with (the state Agency of Human Services), working with the Joint Fiscal Office and also the Legislature, right, to ensure that there’s that appropriate funding in order to ensure its universality,” she said of a primary care program.
Ultimately, though, Janoo said she sees universal primary care as just a stepping stone to something larger: a full-on publicly funded healthcare system, like Vermont tried to enact in the 2010s only to abandon the effort over concerns it was too costly. Universal healthcare is a goal Janoo shares with Sanders, who made “Medicare for All” a key tenet of his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
“It’s about the kind of society we want to live in,” Janoo said Thursday. “Do we want to believe that access to basic healthcare should depend on your income, your employment or your insurance company? Or, do we believe that keeping people healthy is something we all have a stake in — and that we can organize our resources to make it happen?”
This story was first published by VTDigger and is republished with permission as part of the Vermont Journalism Trust’s Community News Sharing Project.