-You've been on the show many times in the studio.
You are our first remote guest.
Thank you so much for making the time.
You are in Vermont right now, correct?
-Yep, I'm in my home in Burlington, Vermont.
-It must often be nice to be back out of D.C., in Vermont.
But obviously the circumstances
are a little different right now.
How have you been balancing
both doing your Senate work and your campaign?
-With much difficulty.
It is a very, very strange time for me.
I think it's a strange time for the American people.
The campaign has been radically changed.
We can't do rallies.
We can't go out and do door-to-door stuff,
which is what we love to do.
As a senator, I can't meet in person with my staff.
So it is -- you know, it's a strange moment for me.
I think for you, normally we would not
be doing the show from your home.
It's a strange, unprecedented moment for the American people.
-One of the moments or one of the unique things
about this moment is how it's making a lot of people
re-evaluate the current system in healthcare.
Obviously Medicare for all is the issue
people most associate you with.
Could you just speak to how this moment would be different
if we had a system like Medicare for all and the shortcomings
of the current system we're living with?
-Well, thank you for asking that question, Seth.
And I think the answer is fairly obvious.
Right now, as we speak, millions of people are losing their jobs.
And some 87 million people already did not have
any health insurance or are underinsured.
So people are sitting home right now, scared to death
that somebody in their family
is going to come down with the virus.
They don't know how they will even pay for the treatment
they receive let alone any other problems their families have.
Second of all, people are asking how does it happen when we spend
twice as much per person on healthcare as any other nation?
And yet our public health system is so weak, so incredibly weak,
that we have doctors and nurses right now
who don't have the masks, don't have the gloves,
don't have the gowns, the protective equipment
they need to keep themselves safe and do the work
that they have to do.
A Medicare-for-all system is designed to provide quality care
for all to do preventive work in order to prepare
for some types of pandemics, not simply to make huge amounts
of money for the insurance companies
and the drug companies.
-This, again, moment in time, led to a bipartisan bill
being passed, a bill that the President signed.
You still used your time on the Senate floor
to be a bit sarcastic towards your Republican colleagues.
We do enjoy your sarcasm.
We feel like it's when your Brooklyn comes out.
You were referring to the fact that some across the aisle
felt that the bill was being too generous to the less fortunate,
to poorer Americans.
In those moments of sarcasm, is that -- is that just masking
a simmering rage you feel when your colleagues react like that?
-Absolutely.
Look, you have folks in the Senate,
my Republican colleagues, who voted for a trillion dollars
in tax breaks for the 1% and large corporations.
And yet in this stimulus package where we fought to make sure
that we expand unemployment, by the way, to a lot more people
than previously were eligible for it,
and then what we said is that over a four-month period
in this terrible time,
when people are so worried about how they're going to
feed their families, et cetera, et cetera,
that for four months we're going to add $600
to what you would normally get from an unemployment check.
So if you get 350, 400 bucks, which is about average,
you know what, you're getting another $600 on top of that.
And we had some of my Republican colleagues that said, "Imagine,
there would be some low-income workers who would actually earn
more from their unemployment check than they previously did
when they were making, you know, 10, 12 bucks an hour.
We can't allow that to happen."
And to me that is so ugly, so grotesque, so immoral,
that I felt compelled to speak out about it.
-One of the other things that's always been a criticism
about the sort of healthcare that you've proposed
is people will say, "Oh, there's going to be rationed care.
There's going to be long lines.
There's going to be death panels."
And yet it does seem like now there is --
Certain people on the right make the argument that,
"Hey, this is just how it goes during a pandemic.
Some people who are most at risk,
you have to sort of make an economic decision about how --
what value to put on their lives."
Is that stunning to you when you hear that?
-Of course it is stunning. It is stunning.
And it speaks to the hypocrisy of these folks.
The truth is, we should ask ourselves
how in the wealthiest country on Earth,
not only our doctors and nurses
don't have the equipment they need,
our EMT people, these are people on ambulances now,
putting their lives on the line, doing incredibly important work,
the cops, the firemen, and they're getting sick.
And in some cases they're getting sick
because they don't have the equipment that they need.
We don't have enough ventilators in certain hospitals, ICU units.
How does that happen in the richest country on Earth?
So I think what this brings us to the conclusion is
that the function of healthcare should not be to make
$100 billion in profits last year for the drug companies
and the insurance companies.
It should be to create a system
which guarantees healthcare to all,
a system which has a strong public health component
so that we have doctors and nurses all over this country,
where today we are in -- have a lot of underserved areas.
And that we make sure that healthcare is a human right.
That's, I think, where we've got to go.
The other thing, if I may say so, Seth,
is that in this terrible, unprecedented moment,
I think it's appropriate for us to ask
how we got here and where we want to go.
What are the lessons that we're learning from this?
When this is all over, and it will be over,
do we simply go back to the same old, same old?
And I hope not.
I hope that we ask why it is that at a time of massive income
and wealth inequality,
half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.
And what we're not talking about right now, Seth,
is that if you are making 14 bucks an hour, 12 bucks an hour,
and that check stops coming in, which is the case,
how are you going to feed your family?
How are you going to pay the rent?
How are you going to keep your telephone going?
We're not talking about that.
And we need another stimulus package, by the way,
which addresses those issues.
And we need to rethink after this epidemic is over
where America should be.