Medicare For All PAC Announces First Candidate Endorsements

The newly formed Medicare for All PAC announced its first batch of endorsements on Friday.

The PAC is backing eight Democratic candidates: Andrew Gillum for governor of Florida; Josh Harder in California’s 10th Congressional District; Katie Porter in California’s 45th; Mike Levin in California’s 49th; Harley Rouda in California’s 48th; Katie Hill in California’s 25th; Kara Eastman in Nebraska’s 2nd; and Liz Watson in Indiana’s 9th. It gave each of the candidates a $2,000 contribution.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) founded the group in September to support candidates and lawmakers who back single-payer health care .

“Access to quality affordable health care is becoming more and more unattainable for American families,” Jayapal said. “That’s why we need fighters in public office committed to making Medicare For All a reality.”

Medicare for all, which would replace the United States’ current patchwork of private and public coverage with a single federally run insurer, has made a dramatic leap into mainstream political discourse since Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) championed it in the 2016 presidential primary. It now enjoys the support of a majority of the House Democratic Caucus and one-third of the Senate Democratic Caucus.

More than half  of the Democratic candidates running in congressional races across the country support Medicare for all, according to the calculations of the National Nurses United labor union.

All of the House candidates the PAC endorsed are on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee list of high-priority “Red to Blue” candidates. And public polling shows Gillum ahead in his bid for governor.

“Medicare for all is not a fringe issue on the left,” a spokesperson for the PAC told HuffPost. “It’s being embraced by some of the most frontline candidates in the country from Congress to governor.”