Other research has shown that income losses due to illness are often the bigger financial hit than medical bills. Neither Mr. Sanders’s “Medicare for all” plan nor his medical debt program would address that secondary issue, though he has also called for guaranteeing workers paid medical leave.
The plan “is well targeted,” said Neale Mahoney, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who studies medical debt. “It just may not be that much relief.”
Mr. Sanders said that, in conversations with people around the country, he had come to see medical debt as the most consistent and visceral manifestation of a broken health care system.
At an event this month in Carson City, Nev., for instance, he heard from a veteran who said he had $139,000 in medical debt. When Mr. Sanders asked the man how he would pay off the debt, the man responded: “I can’t. I can’t. I’m going to kill myself.”
Those kinds of deeply moving moments, he said, drove him to seek a new way to ameliorate that particular pain as part of his overall vision for changing the health care system.
“I have always believed that health care is a human right, and it has always disturbed me immensely that so many of our people are uninsured or underinsured and can’t go to the doctor,” Mr. Sanders said. “But I have learned in this campaign something else, which I didn’t talk about previously, and that is the financial pain that this dysfunctional health care system is causing people.”
The new plan is part of a burst of policy-related activity from the Sanders campaign, which also released a housing plan last week that included a proposal to establish a national rent control standard.