Bernie and Warren Team Up to Own John Delaney Into the Ground

It didn’t take long tonight for the more right-wing 2020 Democratic candidates on Tuesday’s debate stage to attack Bernie Sanders and Elizbeth Warren over Medicare for All.

Both former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Rep. John Delaney started off by slamming Sanders and Warren on their support for Medicare for All. “We can go down the road that Senator Warren and Senator Sanders want to take us,” Delaney said in his opening statement. “Which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that’ll turn off independent voters that’ll get Trump re-elected.

The first question of the night went to Sanders, who immediately shot back at Delaney: “You’re wrong.”

“Five minutes away from here, John, is a country, and it’s called Canada,” Sanders said. “They guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a human right, they spend half of what we spend, and by the way, when you end up in a hospital in Canada, you come out with no bill at all.”

Warren then compared Delaney’s rhetoric to “Republican talking points.”

Delaney—who started a healthcare company in the early 1990s that later traded on the New York Stock Exchange—responded later by saying his competitors on the stage “don’t understand the business of healthcare,” to which Sanders shot back: “It’s not a business!”

If that wasn’t enough, Sanders—in a reference to Delaney’s business career—responded to a charge that Sanders’ math “doesn’t add up” with: “Maybe you did that and made money off of healthcare, but our job is to run a non-profit healthcare system.”