Socialist Chic and the ‘Medicare for All’ Sham

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Aug. 2, 2026 12:34 pm ET | Allysia Finley

[E. Pluribus Unum]

What Abdul El-Sayed proposes is a single-payer system nothing like the program for the elderly.

A friend recently observed that many young, relatively affluent people in his New York City neighborhood—which voted heavily for Zohran Mamdani—dress like hobos and sport Carhartt workwear. Call it socialist chic. The sartorial style is also an apt metaphor for patrician progressives who feign solidarity with the proletariat.

Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing front-runner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Mr. El-Sayed has surged to the lead against Rep. Haley Stevens by presenting himself as a man of the people. He has called for free child care, “Medicare for all” and an 8% wealth tax on billionaires.

“I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires,” he said during a March debate. “I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good healthcare, affordable food.”

Nobody can disagree with the latter goals. But Mr. El-Sayed’s prescriptions to achieve them would expand government control of healthcare and the private economy and exacerbate the socioeconomic inequalities he inveighs against.

Mr. El-Sayed, 41, earned a doctorate in public health from Oxford University and a medical degree from Columbia—though he didn’t complete an internship and isn’t licensed to practice medicine. Instead of caring for patients, he has spent his career nurturing ties to progressive groups. “My career has never been about trying to maximize on money, otherwise I would have just gone and been a surgeon,” he said in June.

Still, he hasn’t done too shabbily. He and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, earned $686,069 in income last year, according to a financial disclosure report he released last month. That...

---

TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS:

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good healthcare, affordable food.”

Billionaires create the jobs that do all that. Governments destroy wealth, steal your wealth, make you lazy and dependent, make you perpetually aggrieved and miserable, and rob your dignity and self respect.

Billionaires do not swim in the gold coins in their vast money vaults like Scrooge McDuck.

[clearcarbon]

“I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires,”

I think an increasing number of billionaires is more a reflection of how worthless our money is becoming rather than of rising affluence of a specific group.

[marktwain]

Precisely.

The dollar is worth about 1/10 of what it was 60 years ago.

[joshua c]

they can do all that by making the state primary

the quiet part

good bye individual rights

no need to pass constitutional amendments

pack the supreme court

and everything they do will be “constitutional”

game over

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I remember an old cartoon from Saturday Evening Post from 1955. Yes, 1955.
A man is in his doctor’s office and the doctor examines him and says....”You are as sound as a dollar! And if you know what that means, YOU ARE A SICK, SICK MAN!”