Democratic congressional candidate supports public health insurance on healthcare panel at UR

Democratic congressional candidate Abigail Spanberger supported offering a public, federal government-run health insurance plan to compete with private ones and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices in a healthcare panel talk hosted in Ukrop Auditorium Sunday afternoon.

The event, hosted by University of Richmond College Democrats and Spanberger for Congress, featured Spanberger, political science professor Tracy Roof, Larry Palmer, director of Virginia Commonwealth University and the College of William & Mary’s Health Policy and Law Initiative and Harry Bear, professor and chair of surgical oncology at VCU. 

Each of the panelists described problems in the healthcare system ranging from overuse of healthcare services to high costs of services and drugs over the course of an hour and a half.

“If I had to pick two words instead of one answer, I would say waste and price,” Bear said when asked what the healthcare system's biggest problems were. “There’s a tremendous amount of administrative waste in our healthcare system because it’s such a complicated hodgepodge of multiple insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid that nobody can figure out.”

Panelists were asked whether they supported a public option, a feature of the original version of the Affordable Care Act that was later removed, or a single-payer healthcare system, which would provide universal healthcare financed through taxes.

Spanberger and Palmer both said they supported implementing a public option. Spanberger specifically said she supported a “Medicare X” bill sponsored by Sen. Tim Kaine, which would provide a public insurance plan option competing with private plans that would be available to everyone and use Medicare’s network of providers. 

Bear, who endorsed a single-payer system, noted that implementing single-payer would require a difficult change that would be opposed by the insurance industry. Roof said reformers should consider that there are other ways to establish universal coverage besides single-payer.

“There’s some serious questions about whether or not a single-payer system would function the way it does in other countries in the U.S. because of the power of special interests in our government,” Roof said. “It might be hijacked in very similar ways, and of course we can see all kinds of problems in the Medicare program.”

Spanberger, who is running against Republican Rep. Dave Brat in Virginia's 7th Congressional District, at one point in the panel addressed an attack ad against her that said Spanberger would increase healthcare spending by $32 trillion and bankrupt Medicare.

“When it’s so political that even when it’s not a program that I advocate for, it’s become this lightning rod,” Spanberger said, referring to a single-payer system that she had not endorsed. “There’s a lot of articles written about how this is the attack ad being used nationwide regardless of what sort of plan people advocate for.”

Wendy Klein, the medical director of Health Brigade, who arranged the panel, called for the audience, which included few students, to vote for Spanberger at the end of the panel and was met with loud applause. 

One attendee from Midlothian, Dorothy Ivey, was most interested in learning about the differences between the public option and single-payer healthcare, she said. Camille Harris, another audience member, said she also was there because she wanted to be familiar with political issues as a canvasser for Democratic candidates.

Harris, who lives outside of Brat’s district, said she was impressed with Spanberger, whom she had seen speak in-person only once before.

“She’s done her homework,” Harris said. “She’s not just up there giving out one-liners and trying to gloss over it and trying to deflect and say, ‘Hey, do you want your individual rights taken away?’”

Contact senior news writer Kay Dervishi at kay.dervishi@richmond.edu.