On a chilly Monday night in January 2019, Kamala Harris was in Des Moines, Iowa, for a CNN town hall. At the time, Harris was the junior senator from California and one of nearly thirty candidates vying to be the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee. A few minutes into the event, a self-employed local resident named Renee Welk asked a pertinent, inevitable question: “What is your solution to ensure that people have access to quality health care at an affordable price?”

Without hesitation, Harris answered, “We need to have Medicare for All.” Then, as the applause rang out, she riffed beautifully. “To live in a civil society, to be true to the ideals and the spirit of who we say we are as a country,” Harris said, “we have to appreciate and understand that access to health care” is not a “privilege” but a “right.”

“It is inhumane,” she continued, “to make people go through a system where they cannot literally receive the benefit of what medical science can offer because some insurance company has decided it doesn’t meet their bottom line in terms of their profit motivation. That is inhumane.”