Once again, the Democratic debate highlighted fundamental differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on how to approach health care.
But the nature of Clinton's criticism of Sanders' health care plans changed a bit.
In the past, the former secretary of state has suggested that Sanders's proposed single-payer health care system would jeopardize existing health programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
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But reeling from a humbling defeat in New Hampshire and criticisms that her attacks on Sanders' plan have been misleading, Clinton focused Thursday night on challenging the costs of the Vermont senator's "Medicare-for-all" proposal.
Sanders, she argued, was offering people an amazing benefit without telling them how the country will pay for it.
"You need to level with people about what they will have at the end of the process you are proposing," she said at one point. "And based on every analysis that I can find by people who are sympathetic to the goal, the numbers don't add up."
Sanders, however, stuck to his guns, insisting that average Americans would pay less for a single-payer plan because the tax increases necessary to finance the program would be offset by the savings achieved by essentially getting rid of the private insurance industry and forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of their drugs.
Throughout the campaign, Sanders has repeatedly highlighted the lower cost of health care in other industrialized countries as evidence that the U.S.'s extraordinary spending on care is driven primarily by an insurance industry that adds no value to care.
"(T)he family right in the middle of the economy would pay $500 dollars more in taxes, and get a reduction in their health care costs of $5,000 dollars," he said. "In my view healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege, and I will fight for that."
The issue of paid family leave came up only peripherally, but the response from the candidates was similar to the way they framed the health care debate.
"(W)e will join the rest of the others–the industrialized world in saying that paid family and medical leave should be a right of all working families," said Sanders, who supports a 0.2 percent increase in payroll taxes that would fund 12 weeks of paid leave for all workers.
Clinton did not mention her specific proposal, which would require 12 weeks of paid leave of at least two-thirds a worker's wages, but she did again suggest that Sanders' plan was unrealistic and expensive.
"In my case, whether it's health care, or getting us to debt-free tuition, or moving us toward paid family leave, I have been very specific about where I would raise the money, how much it would cost, and how I would move this agenda forward," she said.
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