Story highlights Sen. Bernie Sanders talks health care during Iowa visit

He speaks at gathering of progressives

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) The last time Sen. Bernie Sanders was in Iowa, there was an election to win. It was November 2016 and Sanders was barnstorming Hawkeye State college towns, trying in vain to drum up support for Hillary Clinton.

He returned on Saturday under slightly different circumstances. President Donald Trump is finishing his sixth month in office and Senate Republicans are hammering away at an Obamacare overhaul that could cause more than 20 million people to lose insurance over the next 10 years. The campaign continues, but this time around it turns on health care -- beating back the Senate GOP bill while building up support for the single-payer plan Sanders will likely introduce in August.

Making the first of two scheduled summer visits here, the state that will play host to the first-in-the-nation caucuses of a still far-off presidential campaign season, Sanders kept up his broadsides against the Republican health care overhaul, calling it the most "anti-working class legislation in the history of the country." He named and tried to shame both of his Senate colleagues from Iowa, pleading with the Republicans repeatedly to reject the bill.

"I say to Sen. Grassley and Sen. Ernst, please, please take a hard look at what this disastrous legislation will do to the people of Iowa and the people of America," the Vermont senator said. "I beg of them: please vote 'no' on this legislation."

Had he arrived on the scene in Des Moines an hour or so earlier, Sanders might have been able to deliver the message personally to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who by some cosmic coincidence happened to be in town -- just an escalator ride away -- in the same building, speaking at the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering hosted by conservative evangelical activist Bob Vander Plaats.

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