Sanders draws thousands to rallies against Senate healthcare bill

by Rebecca Savransky - 06/25/17 4:10 PM ET

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) drew thousands of people to his rallies this weekend, held to encourage senators to oppose the Senate GOP healthcare plan.

On Saturday night, Sanders drew a crowd of about 1,600 in Pennsylvania, according to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

“We will not be part of a process which takes from working families, takes from the sick, takes from the children, takes from the elderly, takes from the poor, in order to give huge tax breaks to people who don’t need them,” Sanders said during the rally.

{mosads}“A great nation is not judged by the number of millionaires and billionaires it has,” he continued, but “how well it rests the most vulnerable.”

On Sunday, the Vermont senator held a rally in Ohio, where he drew about 2,200 people and similarly spoke out against the Senate’s healthcare proposal.

“We will not allow 23 million Americans to be thrown off of the health insurance they currently have in order to give $500,000,000,000 in tax breaks to the wealthiest two percent, to the insurance companies and to the drug companies,” Sanders said in Columbus, according to NBC 4.

The rallies were held as part of a MoveOn.org bus tour headlined by Sanders. The events are meant to urge senators to oppose the Senate GOP healthcare plan.

As part of the tour, Sanders was scheduled to headline three rallies in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia as he joins the Democratic effort to stop the push to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

The announcement of the bus tour came after Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled a draft version of their healthcare plan.

The Senate’s bill includes deep cuts to Medicaid and fundamentally reshapes the program from an open-ended government commitment to a system of capped federal payments that limit federal spending.

Sanders also spoke out against the healthcare bill after its release, saying during an interview last week on MSNBC that “thousands of people will die” if the new GOP ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill passes in the Senate.

Tags Bernie Sanders Efforts to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act replacement proposals