In 2026, voters in Michigan will cast ballots for races involving the office of Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. Gary Peters (D-MI) is opting to retire, so there’s an open U.S. Senate seat.
Democrats have three strong candidates: Abdul El-Sayed, Mallory McMorrow, and Haley Stevens. All three have raised millions of dollars for their campaigns ahead of the August primary.
Over the next few months, Detroit Public Radio will be checking in with the candidates so our listeners can make an informed decision. The focus of this first round of interviews is to set a baseline for the candidates views on policy and what separates them from their competitors.
The series continues with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a public health expert who has served as the health director for both Detroit and Wayne County.
He talked with All Things Considered Detroit Host Russ McNamara on Jan. 21, 2026.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Medicare for All
Russ McNamara, WDET: You’ve written a book about Medicare for All. Why do you prefer that over a public option for health insurance?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: We’re watching as healthcare is becoming very quickly one of the most unsustainable features on anybody’s budget sheet. You’re seeing premiums go up 10, 15, 20%—and that’s not even if you’re on one of the ACA plans, for which the Trump Administration has now pulled subsidies going into next year. The unsustainability of our system is going to be paramount, and it’s going to be top of voters’ minds.
I’ve been consistent about the need for Medicare for All.
Medicare for All is government health insurance guaranteed for everyone, regardless of what circumstances you’re in. If you like your insurance through your employer or through your union, I hope that’ll be there for you. But if you lose your job, if your factory shuts down, you shouldn’t be destitute without the health care that you need and deserve.
But Medicare for All does more than just guaranteeing health care. It also addresses the increasing costs that we’re seeing skyrocket in our system by being able to negotiate prices on behalf of all of us, and it also creates a system where doctors and hospitals and clinics can compete with each other in a truly free market system. This is what we’ve needed in America for a very long time, and like you said, I wrote a book on how to do it back in 2021.
The foundations of our system have just gotten less sustainable since then. It would free us of so many of the fears that people have every day, the $225 billion of medical debt that Americans currently hold, which is higher than the GDP of half of the states in the entire country.
And beyond that, it gives us the safety and security that would spur the economy. Too often, small businesses don’t get founded simply because people are stuck in dead end jobs, even if they have an amazing idea, because they’re afraid of losing their health insurance.
Now a public option is exactly that; it’s just an option. There is no reason why it would actually address any of the foundational problems in our system. It wouldn’t bring down the rising costs. It wouldn’t guarantee people health care, and we don’t really know how much it would cost. Plus, there’s an added thing that folks need to think a little bit about—that those of us who’ve thought about the health care system understand—if you have a public option, what happens is, the private health insurance system will try to dump all of the most expensive patients onto that public option, vastly increasing the cost of that public option and making it unsustainable.
That being said, I want to be clear about something. I think too often when we talk about health care we talk about this or that. To me, anything that increases health care access, anything that would do so by increasing the public’s capacity to provide it and would reduce the power of corporations, is something that I would vote for. But I’m not going to make the mistake of pretending like that’s the whole answer. The whole answer is we need to get to Medicare for all. But if you want to climb to Mount Everest, you got to get to base camp, and you got to climb some other hills.
So I understand that we need to take steps along the way. But anybody who wants to tell you that somehow a public option will solve our health care problems doesn’t understand how health care works, or has taken too much money from the industry that does not want Medicare for All because of what it may mean for their profits.
The growing wealth gap
RM: High health care costs are just one part of the equation when it comes to the high expenses that Americans are facing right now. There’s also a concentration of wealth in the top 1, 5, 10% How do you address the growing wealth gap in this country?
AE: You know, I’m the only person running for U.S. Senate who’s never taken a dime of corporate money to fund a campaign, and that shows up in the ways that I stand up to corporations. So there’s two pieces here.
Number one: we’ve got to make it so that corporations can no longer buy access to politicians to do their bidding—a system that every other candidate I am running against has willingly participated in but me—and that makes sure that the system is not rigged against the rest of us, so that big corporations and billionaires can continue to make yet more money off of a system that funnels money from our back pockets into theirs.
But the second part of this is that I think we finally need to start taxing billionaire wealth. I’ve been very clear about the fact that for too long, our system has allowed billionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than you and I, who make our money the old fashioned way—working for it.
The way we should be judging our economy is not by how much wealth accumulates at the very top, how many more billionaires we spit out, but rather we should be judging our economy based on whether or not it provides everyday Americans access to the basic means of a dignified life.
And I think we need to rethink the way that we do taxation in mainly so that we’re taxing the wealth of people make $100 million or more, because guess what? If you tax a billionaire at 8%, guess what? They’re still they’re still a billionaire. They’re still going to have money their kids, kids, kids, kids are still going to be rich.
And I think that we can get along to making sure that our kids have great public schools, that we’re providing health care and good infrastructure for all of us. And if we can do that, I think we can start to bring down the massive wealth inequality that’s only growing in this country.
RM: Ethically, should billionaires exist?
AE: I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires. 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 health care, affordable food, the experience of knowing that you’re sending your kid to a school that dignifies their brain and empowers them for a career into the future.
Too few people have access to that right now, and I think that the way we should be judging our economy is not by how much wealth accumulates at the very top, how many more billionaires we spit out, but rather we should be judging our economy based on whether or [it] not provides everyday Americans access to the basic means of a dignified life.
We are the richest, most powerful country in the world. It is a crazy thing that people are struggling to afford their groceries, struggling to afford housing, wondering whether or not if they’re under 40 they’ll ever own a home, or if they can stay in their home. If they’re under 65, worried about whether or not they are going to go bankrupt simply because they got sick. Those are choices that we make, and at the wrong end of creating an economy that spits out more and more billionaires is the opportunity to be able to solve so many of those challenges for folks.
I think we need to reorient that system. That means, yes, taxing billionaires—it also means rethinking the firewall that should exist between billionaire money and corporate money and our politics. It means standing with unions, it means empowering small businesses, and it means guaranteeing every single person the health care that they need and deserve.
Data centers and the AI boom
RM: Michiganders seem to hate data centers. The growing AI boom—if it comes to fruition—will eat up a lot of resources. How would you weigh the need to address climate change with the constant need for business growth and more jobs in this state?
AE: In the last year alone we’ve had 15 data center proposals. Each of those data centers is partnering with a corporate utility that has raised our rates without actually improving the reliability of our electricity. Our costs go up, our reliability does not and we’re watching as these huge corporations are partnering with these utilities to try and bring these projects into our communities, promising a certain number of jobs.
I understand the fears that everyday folk have about what this will mean for the price of their electricity, the water that we take for granted in a state like Michigan, whether or not they’re going to have a job in the future. And so we’ve issued a data center terms of engagement. And what these terms of engagement are meant to do is clarify what the real risks are and hold data center projects accountable to addressing those risks.
Number 1: if you’re promising jobs, you better actually create the good union jobs that you say you want to create.
Number 2: your project should not increase the price of electricity for anyone in our state.
Number 3: you should have closed loop systems that do not rely on our fresh water or stress our water infrastructure.
Number 4: there should be a community benefits agreement that is negotiated with the local community to make sure that the value of the project actually moves into the community in which it’s going to be housed.
Number 5: investments that are made should improve the reliability of our utilities.
Number 6: these should be enforceable by penalty.
And the beautiful thing about this approach is that it offers a roadmap, both for local communities to hold data center projects accountable, but also it creates the pathway for the kind of federal legislation that I’d like to get passed as a U.S. Senator.
But these are challenges that we’re facing and the kind of approach that we’ve seen on the part of the corporations and the utilities, where they try to fly by night and steamroll local municipalities to get their projects done, all it’s done is fan the flame on mis and disinformation.
So what we want is clarity. We want transparency. We want integrity. We want honesty, and we want to make sure that folks understand exactly what’s coming to their local communities.
Accountability in government, Supreme Court reform
RM: Do you support the elimination of the filibuster, and how do you feel about making significant changes to the structure of the Supreme Court, whether it’s packing it, term limits, or making sure that there’s some sort of ethical accountability?
AE: The filibuster allows senators to hide behind just one senator, in effect, veiling them from democracy itself. Because if you don’t have to take a hard vote, your public won’t hold you accountable for the hard vote that you just took.
Similarly, the Supreme Court has acted in ways that demonstrate that really it’s become just a third political arm of government. So I oppose the filibuster.
If you look at what Trump is doing, he’s doing most of it by executive fiat. Most of what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to operate through the White House itself and where checks have failed have been at the Supreme Court, and I think that we need to start talking a bit about what term limits might look like.
I don’t think that this current system serves our democracy very well. I proposed a system that says that every president should have three appointments. Every Supreme Court justice should have at least 10 years and a possible renewal for another 10 years. But what that does is it incentivizes the selection of of jurists who want to interpret the Constitution on its own terms, because all of them may not know who the person making a decision about the reappointment might be, and it addresses the fact that you don’t want jurists who are too Junior and haven’t had as much experience or too senior, and may not be at the top of their game. I do think we need Supreme Court reform.
Foreign policy
RM: U.S. foreign policy is currently at the forefront of the global conversation with President Trump’s ongoing thirst for Greenland, his Board of Peace for Gaza and the recent attack on Venezuela for oil. As a senator, what would your ideal foreign policy for the US?
AE: I believe in international law. I read my history. I look at all the effort after World War II, to stop the next world war from happening again. And courageous leaders who watched the carnage of that war came together and said, We need international law that we all abide by.
And the frustration is that as we’ve developed as the world’s superpower, we have sometimes abided by that international law and sometimes broken it. And I think where we have abided by it, where we have stood up, for example, to protect international law in circumstances like Bosnia and Herzegovina, in circumstances like Ukraine, I think we do great good in the world, but too often, we have decided to skirt that international law. When you look at the war in Iraq, when you look at Vietnam, and right now, when you look at the unilateral funding and subsidies of a genocide in Gaza, we have been the chief violator of international law.
My vision for our foreign policy is that, yes, we are strong, but we are the first among equals to stand up for that international law, rather than being the first to break it.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
RM: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been terrorizing immigrants in communities of color – in blue states and cities – especially over the past year. Should ICE exist?
AE: No, we need to abolish ICE.
I just recently came back from my own personal fact finding mission in Minneapolis. Now I’m running for Senate in Michigan, but I also understand that if they can occupy a city like Minneapolis, they can do the same here in Michigan.
I just want to be clear about what ICE is. They tell us that this is about immigration and customs enforcement, but let’s be clear, immigration law is not criminal law, it’s civil law. So why do you need masked men carrying heavy weaponry on peaceful streets?
They tell us that this is about protecting the southern border, but I’ve looked at a map, and Minneapolis is not very close to the southern border. We can have a safe and secure southern border. We can enforce immigration law. But ICE is not about that. ICE is a paramilitary force normalizing the use of government power on peaceful streets, in thrall to one man. They are using the pretext of immigration to weaponize against the laws and norms and mores of our democracy and our Constitution itself. And I believe that it ought to be abolished.
If the idea of ICE is that they’re supposed to keep you safe, go ask Renee Good, or her widow or her orphaned child about how safe Renee Good is because of ICE.
I talked about abolishing ice back in 2018 because anybody could have seen where this is going. And now we’ve gotten here, and I shudder for our state, because they’re talking about buying a facility in Highland Park. They’ve got the facility in Baldwin. I do not want to see what I saw in Minneapolis here at home.
So when I’m in the U.S. Senate, I intend to lead the effort to abolish ICE, because I do not believe that it has anything to do with keeping our southern border secure and safe—which I intend to do—or with enforcing any of the laws when it comes to immigration, this is about normalizing paramilitary force and thrall to one man on our streets. And if there is anything that’s antithetical to the idea of America, it’s that.
Transgender rights
RM: The rights of transgender people to seek care, serve in the military or just play high school sports has been used by conservatives as a wedge issue, not just between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Democratic Party, what will you do to support that small, but disproportionately targeted part of our community?
AE: I believe that rights are rights, are rights, and when you assent to somebody taking away somebody else’s rights, you are at some point assenting to somebody coming for yours.
We have to stand together to fight for our collective rights, even when those rights are rights we may never see ourselves using. And I think that is it is critical for us to recognize where MAGA has tried to use this conversation to tear people apart, to get them into positions where we’re having a conversation about high school sports, rather than a conversation about health care or a conversation about affordable groceries or a conversation about how to make sure home ownership is possible. Those are the conversations that I’m hearing about up and down my state.
So I think it’s perfectly within the means of local communities and sporting governing bodies to lead the conversation about high school sports. I think it’s important for doctors to be able to provide the health care that their patients need in consultation with their parents if they are not of age.
But that has nothing to do with our broader public conversation in our politics. And so I want politics to be solving the problems that politics should be about solving. I want to make sure that communities and parents and families and doctors and sporting bodies get to make these decisions together, in consultation with each other, to take on these problems. Because every single moment that Republicans want us to be talking about trans kids or trans kids playing sports is a moment we’re not talking about making sure that everybody gets the health care that they need and deserve, and that people get access to housing, and those are the conversations we need to take on that they are imminent in our lives.
But rights are rights, are rights, and we need to be standing up for everybody’s rights when anybody tries to take them away.
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