Christina Starks-Clay doesn't know how "Medicare for All" would work exactly, but she's willing to bet it'd be better than what she has now. This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News. While standing in line for a Sept. 11 town hall for U.S.
Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Lansing, she whipped out her phone and pulled up a screenshot. It was of the $1,000 cashier's check she'd picked up at the bank that day to pay down a chunk of her son's dental bills. Starks-Clay, an early childhood special education paraprofessional, still owed the dentist $389, even with good dental insurance.
Her own cleaning a few weeks before had cost $600. She tried to talk herself down at the bank, to focus on being grateful for what she could afford. "I'm like, 'Tina, OK, you were in a position for this moment to do this,'" she said.
"A lot of people couldn't do what I had to do today. So I need to hear, how are you going to make this better for everyone?" Many who waited in the hot sun that afternoon in a line stretching blocks through downtown Lansing shared similar anxieties. A man ahead of Starks-Clay talked about watching his brother rack up thousands of dollars in medical debt.
A professor emeritus at nearby Michigan State University worried aloud about his grandkids' medical care, because his adult kids were struggling to meet a $9,000 insurance deductible. Healthcare workers who'd turned up for the event described patients choosing between affording medication or food, or how they themselves had been financially devastated by a medical crisis. They all knew El-Sayed's rallying cry by heart, chanting it when the Michigan Democrat took the stage: "Money out of politics!
Medicare for All!" Support for Medicare for All is at its highest in at least a decade, according to a new KFF poll. The survey found two-thirds of Americans now favor expanding the government health program that largely covers seniors (about half of whom are enrolled in private plans through Medicare Advantage). But many people don't actually know how to define Medicare for All.
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