It also enables Medicare to negotiate the price of some prescription drugs, caps the annual out-of-pocket costs of the program’s beneficiaries at $2,000 and extends pandemic-era health insurance subsidies. Sanders supported the resulting compromise, finalized after a year of strained negotiations and setbacks, because he concluded that “the pluses outweighed the negatives”.Ī core pillar of the bill is nearly $400bn in climate and energy proposals, a historic sum that scientists estimate will help the US cut emissions by about 40% by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels. “And if we cannot succeed because we don’t have the 50 votes, at least let the American people understand that we are fighting for them, and that we had to make a compromise to do far, far, far less than what is necessary.” “It seems to me that what we should have done is gone forward with a bold agenda, to show the American people, ordinary people, that we understand what’s going on in their lives,” he said. With control of Congress at stake this fall, Sanders believes Democrats squandered a major opportunity, probably their last before the midterm elections, to show voters what they could deliver with even larger majorities in Congress. But he believes it would have gone a long way in addressing the widespread economic distress that is undermining Americans’ faith in their government. The original proposal was, in his view, already a compromise. The legislation, which Biden is expected to sign into law next week, is but a sliver of the ambitious domestic policy initiative that Sanders, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, helped draft last year. “And I worry very much … that people are giving up on democracy because they do not believe that their government is working for them.” “We are living in enormously difficult times,” he said in an interview with the Guardian.
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