Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made headlines this week by getting Democrats to sign onto his Medicare-for-all health plan, but his outlook on such a plan wasn’t always so rosy.

In fact, in 1987, when Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, VT, he guessed that a medicaid-for-all system would “bankrupt the nation.”

Sanders was still in favor of universal access to care, stating on his show “Bernie Speaks with the Community” that he “want[s] to guarantee that all people have access to healthcare as you do in Canada.”

However, he didn’t seem to think the United States could take on the financial burden.

“But I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that,” he said. “For example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a Medicaid card – we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”

Now, Sanders and other probable 2020 candidates such as Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, seem fine with the astronomical costs of a medicare-for-all system.

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