On Friday evening, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, told a local television news host that she does not support a single-payer health care system, despite the fact that Warren publicly advocated for such a system in 2008. Watch the video below:
HOST: If you were the tsarina, something like single-payer, government run health care, far lower administrative costs, that sort of thing, would be the Senator Warren prescription, would it not?
ELIZABETH WARREN: I think right now what we have to do--I’m serious about this--I think you’ve got to stay with what’s possible. And I think what we’re doing–and look at the dust-up around this–we really need to consolidate our gains around what we’ve got on the table.
HOST: But you do support single-payer, do you not?
WARREN: No, what I’ve got right now…
HOST: You’ve wrote repeatedly that you have, have you not?
WARREN: Oh! I think you need to go back and take a look.
HOST: I have a paragraph: ‘The most obvious solution would be universal, single-payer health care. Single-payer care would also free families from dependents on an employers’ plan and make certain that everyone is covered whether or not – you wrote that with a co-author from Ohio.
WARREN: I wrote that with two. Two I think. That’s exactly right. But the point is, what we’ve got to do, is we’ve got to keep moving in the direction of getting more families covered and bringing down the costs of health care, and I think we’ve taken a big step in that direction.
The quotation the host reads comes from an essay Warren co-authored with Deborah Thorne that was included in a 2008 book, Health at Risk.
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