At an event in Burlington Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders steered clear of a question about the possibility of a presidential run by the liberal senator. Speculation about a Sanders run began after Sanders told The Nation magazine that he is "prepared to run for president of the United State."
At a press conference about the importance of primary care in Vermont, Sanders all but ignored a question from the Burlington Free Press' Sam Hemingway about whether he'd seek the nation's highest office in 2016.
Sanders quickly steered the conversation back to health care.
Hemingway: You've talked about running for president, and I know that this is about health care- Sanders: Yeah, it is about health care actually. It is. Hemingway: Is this an issue you'd want to address if you were running for president and have you made a decision on whether you're going to run as a Democrat? Sanders: This is an issue that has been of concern to me my entire life and will always be an issue of concern to me. I believe that the United States has got to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to every person as a right, and it really bothers me that even with the advances of the Affordable Care Act, some 30 million people still remain uninsured. Others have high deductibles, high copayments, and yet at the end of all that, we are spending almost twice as much per capita as many other countries. So do I think that health care is a very important issue? I sure do.
Sanders traveled to New Hampshire earlier in April to see whether his idea had political support in that state, but has refused to say whether or not he will run for president.
