In Montana U.S. Senate race, Jon Tester exaggerates Tim Sheehy’s Medicare position

In the closely watched Montana Senate race, incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester has accused his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, of wanting to radically change the U.S. health care system.

A campaign Facebook ad that began running Sept. 6 said, "Tim Sheehy told us his health care plan: ‘We need to return health care to pure privatization.’ That would eliminate Medicare, increase prescription drug costs, let insurance companies deny coverage for any reason, and force rural hospitals and nursing homes to close. Montana can’t afford Tim Sheehy."

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Here, we’ll focus on the assertion that Sheehy’s health plan "would eliminate Medicare."

Sheehy entered the race June 27, 2023, following a career as a U.S. Navy SEAL and head of an aerial firefighting company. His "pure privatization" comment came during an August 2023 event in Glasgow, Montana; the position is not reflected in other things he has said before and since. 

Sheehy’s campaign website says nothing about a desire to "eliminate Medicare," and his campaign confirmed that position.

The "pure privatization" comment surfaced publicly when Semafor published an attendee’s audio recording on Dec. 4, 2023.

"Our hospitals have been built around federal health care subsidies. So, in my opinion, we need to return health care to pure privatization," Sheehy said. 

Sheehy later compared health care with the federal student loan program. 

"Colleges know they can charge whatever they want to charge because student loans will pay," he said. "It’s similar in health care, where we’ve got a subsidy system that’s got perverse incentives."

To answer an attendee’s question about whether he favored putting "all health care into the hands of insurance companies" or include "some kind of a subsidy," Sheehy conjured a period before the health system, that in his view, became complicated.

"Health care worked before health insurance existed," he said in the recording. "Each town had a doctor that would drive to your house, take care of you and you’d pay him or her. You’d give them money. And guess what? It worked. It worked when you actually paid a doctor for services provided. And then we started getting into this HMO (health maintenance organization), insurance, mega-conglomerate structure."

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Sheehy did not address Medicare in the Glasgow recording. But Tester’s campaign argues that "pure privatization" would rope in Medicare, a fully government-run program for Americans older than 65.

That would be unlikely to pass Congress because Medicare tends to be popular. Fifty-seven percent of adults, including 50% of Republicans, expressed a favorable opinion of the program in a 2020 YouGov survey. Among federal programs, only Social Security had a higher favorability rating.

Besides extrapolating from Sheehy’s ad-libbed remark, Tester’s campaign is ignoring Sheehy’s subsequent comments on Medicare.

On his campaign website, Sheehy shares criticisms of the U.S. health care system, including the Affordable Care Act, sometimes called "Obamacare." The act expanded health care access by increasing Medicaid eligibility in some states, adding subsidies for private insurance and barring companies from denying insurance to people with preexisting health conditions. 

But he does not call for eliminating Medicare. Sheehy’s website says: 

"Our health care system is broken. Because of Obamacare, Montanans face higher premiums year after year. We’ve lost access to doctors and health care plans we were told we could keep. More government control of our health care has only made things worse. Like most Montanans, I believe we need to promote greater transparency, competition, and shopping for services in our health care system. We should be rewarding outcomes and innovation, improving access to care in our rural communities, and most importantly, protecting Montanans with pre-existing conditions."

In a Sept. 10 op-ed about health care in the Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle, Sheehy wrote: "I will always protect Montanans with pre-existing conditions and make sure the politicians back in Washington don’t touch Medicare. Our nation made a promise to our seniors to protect their Medicare and Social Security benefits, and I will honor that promise and preserve the benefits they’ve earned."

Responding to an inquiry for this article, Sheehy’s campaign said Sheehy doesn’t favor privatizing Medicare and added similar points from the op-ed.

The statement to PolitiFact mirrored what the campaign told Semafor when the audio recording was made public in December.

The Tester campaign ad said, "Tim Sheehy told us his health care plan, ‘We need to return health care to pure privatization.’ That would eliminate Medicare."

Sheehy did use the term "pure privatization" when discussing the U.S. health care system at an August 2023 event. However, he did not say he intended to eliminate Medicare.

By focusing on this quote, the Tester campaign is cherry-picking one Sheehy statement that conflicts with the approach to health care policy outlined on his campaign website, in a recent op-ed and in a statement to PolitiFact.

We rate the statement Mostly False.