Abdul El-Sayed, in a series of unearthed podcast remarks, called for a "truly inclusive" universal health care entitlement that would include "care for transgender people" and "care for immigrants." He later criticized conservatives for demonizing "the undocumented person who comes to this country and wants to get gender reassignment surgery on Medicare for All."
Transgender immigrants seeking government-funded gender treatments, he said, were the "prime example" that conservatives would use to turn the public against universal health care, "because it captures a group of multiple marginalized people whom they want to cast as being undeserving."
El-Sayed made the remarks in 2021 and 2022 in podcasts unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon. El-Sayed—who at the time was a former Michigan gubernatorial candidate working as a commentator and podcaster—called for a "truly inclusive" taxpayer-funded universal health care system that provides the "full gamut of health care that any and everyone would need." Such a plan, he said, should include health care for illegal aliens, transgender people, and transgender illegal aliens seeking sex-change procedures.
"When you talk about care for transgender people, when you talk about care for immigrants," El-Sayed said on a Boston University health policy podcast on March 24, 2021, "all of these things are going to be deeply politicized."
"And my hope, right, is that we would pass a Medicare for All that is truly inclusive and offers the full gamut of health care that any and everyone would need," he went on.
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist-turned-politician who wrote a book about Medicare for All, expanded on his utopian vision for the government-run health system on his podcast, America Dissected.
"A lot of the most difficult conversations break on the question of who deserves what care, right?" he said in an episode on Feb. 15, 2022.
"The prime example that conservatives will impose on a conversation about Medicare for All will be ‘Well, what do we do with the undocumented person who comes to this country and wants to get gender reassignment surgery on Medicare for All,’" he said.
Conservatives seeking to demonize transgender illegal immigrants seeking sex change treatments were guilty of "the original sin of racism," he said.
"That’s going to be the example that they’re going to push forward because it captures a group of multiple marginalized people whom they want to cast as being undeserving," El-Sayed said.
It’s the kind of position that helped undermine Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. Harris stated in a 2019 questionnaire during her first failed presidential bid that she supported government-funded gender transition care for people in federal custody, including illegal aliens and prisoners, CNN reported.
Republicans hammered Harris with ads asserting the Democrat "is for they/them; President Trump is for you"—a reference to the transgender lobby’s infatuation with so-called preferred pronouns.
El-Sayed embraced other far-left positions during the same era, the height of what his ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who campaigned with him on Thursday—has dubbed "Woke 1.0."
In 2020, El-Sayed called to defund police departments and suggested in a podcast that police officers should not carry guns.
El-Sayed, who has doubled down on his support for Medicare for All, has suggested the program should cover any medical procedures that a doctor and patient deem necessary. And he has said explicitly that it should cover "gender-affirming care," a euphemism for chemical and surgical sex-change treatments for both adults and children.
"I believe that Medicare for All should cover all health care, which is defined by what a patient needs in accordance with their doctor," he said this year, "so that includes reproductive rights, that includes gender-affirming care."
And El-Sayed’s support for "gender-affirming care" for minors extends to surgeries. In a bizarre exchange with Fox News's Jesse Watters in which the candidate asked the TV anchor whether he is "circumcised" after Watters pressed him on the issue of sex-change-related surgeries for minors.
"Circumcision's different than castration," Watters said.
"Circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling," El-Sayed shot back.
El-Sayed has also defended providing Medicare for All for illegal aliens.
"A lot of folks will get up in arms when you say you want to provide health care for people who are undocumented," he said at a health conference in 2017. He said Medicare for All for illegal aliens "just makes sense because it’s good policy and efficient." He asserted that a failure to cover illegal aliens would lead them to seek health care at emergency rooms and that taxpayers would ultimately foot the bill.
At the same time, El-Sayed broadly opposes efforts to curtail illegal immigration. He has called for abolishing ICE, the agency that handles deportations, and decriminalizing illegal border crossing.
"Abdul wants to guarantee healthcare for every single American taxpayer and believes that medical decisions should be between a patient, their family, and their doctor," said campaign spokesman Cole Wozniak.
