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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has said that he now opposes Medicare for All, flipping on his previous stance just as Democrats are on the cusp of potentially winning back control of the House.

Medicare for All is “not legislation that I am currently cosponsoring or that I support,” Jeffries said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Jeffries declined to say whether or not he would bring the legislation to a vote, though suggested that he wouldn’t, in the case that Democrats retake the House — which some pollsters say is a likely outcome.

This is a reversal of his stance from just a few years ago. Jeffries first announced that he was backing the legislation in 2019, and was listed as a cosponsor as recently as 2021. But he dropped off of the cosponsor list in 2023, after he succeeded Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California) to take the helm of House Democratic leader.

In the interview, Jeffries did not offer a different policy solution, but rather the vague promise that Democrats are “going to fight to make health care affordable for every single American,” he said.

Jeffries has often offered platitudes in the face of the health care crisis; last year, as Republicans were gutting the Affordable Care Act and kicking millions of Americans off of their health insurance, Jeffries simply said that, to........

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