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AE Abdul El-Sayed Abdul El-Sayed Abdul El-Sayed was director of Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services in Michigan from 2023 to 2025.

“It's not the Republican opposition I'm worried about. It's the industry opposition. Industry spends huge amounts of money to push back on all of this. They spend it in electioneering, they spend it in lobbying, and they spend it on ads, right?”

The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · September 2026

“It's not the Republican opposition I'm worried about. It's the industry opposition. Industry spends huge amounts of money to push back on all of this. They spend it in electioneering, they spend it in lobbying, and they spend it on ads, right?” — Abdul El-Sayed, The Ezra Klein Show

Context

Asked by Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show why past efforts at single-payer health care collapsed, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, says the opposition to expect comes from industry.

Transcript

The Ezra Klein Show Around 59:21 into the episode
Abdul El-Sayed

…some of the pushback. No, you tell people you're going to solve some of their problem and you get all the pushback. So how come you lose the fight? Well, because you didn't create that much excitement about actually doing the thing you wanted to do and you got all the pushback from the industry. I

Ezra Klein

…it is. It gets really, really hard. So you do get the Republican opposition, but the fear of just seeing the whole thing collapse in on itself because people fear having too much taken away from them, abolishing private health insurance and that kind of thing, like that comes from somewhere.

Abdul El-Sayed

Let me push back. It's not the Republican opposition I'm worried about. It's the industry opposition. Industry spends huge amounts of money to push back on all of this. They spend it in electioneering, they spend it in lobbying, and they spend it on ads, right? Miss and disinformation via ads. So I think there are three things that we really need to be learning from those wars, right? With all due respect to the people who fought them before. Number one, the war doesn't start the day you decide to do health reform. The war starts the day you start thinking about doing healthcare reform. And you have to have a broad national conversation early. Number…

Ezra Klein

He really failed at that on healthcare. When

Abdul El-Sayed

it comes to healthcare, but also, again, it wasn't the thing he was running on. It was like, we got here, let's do healthcare. Rather than let's have a big national conversation about healthcare and build a head of steam around the politics of this, knowing full well that they are going to hit with…

Speaker 3

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