. El-Sayed, an early and passionate supporter of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, recently accepted a position on the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, which was assigned to establish healthcare policies that the entire Democratic Party — from the far left to the center — could support.
"As a former health director, I'm often reminded that numbers don't do as good a job in explaining what's at stake as the stories of people's lives," he said. When we talk about the 20 million Americans who have no health insurance, "we have to remember every one of those people is somebody with a particular set of precarious circumstances, who has joys and fears, and people who love them and people they love.
"We don't know what the long-term consequences of COVID-19 are going to be," he said. "This disease has only really been in humans now for about nine months, and we don't know what the implications are." El-Sayed said that our healthcare affects every aspect of our lives — even the economics of it: "Who gets access to a good job that pays a living wage? Who's allowed to stay home and work from behind the computer screen? Who has to go to work in the midst of a global pandemic?" If you work in a low-wage "essential" job that puts you on public transit every day, you could be putting your future at risk in a way that white-collar workers do not.
But the policy that the Sanders and Biden teams agreed upon, while not as sweeping, is still robust, progressive, and offers the possibility to change healthcare in America forever. That kind of stability would change healthcare as we know it in America, giving workers more control over their health while also likely shrinking one of the biggest costs for full-time employers.
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