Sen. Andy Kim is taking a unique approach to the Senate.
The New Jersey Democrat is trying to spark a debate about how to achieve a very-long-sought goal of his party — universal health care — while blending it with a long-term outlook that might take years or even decades to fully achieve.
“I’m trying to think through everything I can do for the next two-and-a-half years. But I’m also thinking through the next two-and-a-half decades,” Kim, 44, who is 18 months into his first Senate term, told NOTUS in an interview. “What do I want to accomplish here, what is the type of senator I want to be? And I think this is, particularly, very meaningful.”
On Tuesday, Kim is introducing the MediKids Act, which would effectively enroll every child into a section of Medicaid that is already used to provide health services for children from lower-income families.
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The legislation, which does not yet have a full cost estimate, would fully fund health coverage for children from birth until age 26. Families would be free to opt out of the federally funded health insurance if they wanted different plans in the private sector, but the impact could be similar to how Medicare takes care of seniors once they turn 65.
Kim described his proposal as creating “bookends” for the most critical years: federally guaranteed health coverage from birth to 25 and 65 till death, about half of the average American life of 79 years.
Health experts estimate that 6% of children under 18, about 4.5 million, do not have any health insurance. Kim said that another 23 million are “under insured.”
Kim’s ultimate goal, however, is to have members of his party think bigger and more realistically about the drive to achieve the elusive Democratic dream of universal health care — an “Odyssey”-like endeavor that began at least in the early 1940s when John Dingell Sr. introduced the first national health-care bill. For the last decade the party has been battling over progressive demands of creating “Medicare for All” versus the more mainstream approach of expanding on the landmark 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The ACA helped drive down the number of uninsured from about 46 million in 2010 to roughly 26 million, according to KFF, an independent health-research firm.
Republicans have enjoyed the Democratic infighting over those competing ideas and, as far back as 2018, have used political hit ads calling “Medicare for All” a “massive government-run system” that would force Americans off health-care plans they like.
Kim is trying to create a different approach that takes the politically safer ground of guaranteeing health care for children.
“It’s the clearest point to be made about the need for universal health care and the idea that health care is a human right,” Kim said. “I really hope that none of my colleagues will really look me in the eye and say they don’t think every child should get health care in this country.”
Kim is not the first name insiders would expect to try to lead a new health-care effort. He’s one of the most junior members of the Senate health committee and does not have a seat on the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare and Medicaid.
But the Rhodes scholar and foreign-policy expert who worked in the State Department, Pentagon and on then-President Barack Obama’s National Security Council holds an unusual set of crossover credentials among Democrats. He has both won a battleground district and earned plaudits from the online progressive orbit.
He launched his political career in 2017 when one of his children was born with a preexisting medical condition, at a time when congressional Republicans advanced legislation to repeal the ACA and end protections for those with such a condition. Their push ultimately fell short.
“That anxiety that I felt as a parent was gut-wrenching. I don’t believe that there’s anything more fearful, parents are more scared of, than their kid being sick,” he said.
After winning a Republican-held district to the east of Philadelphia, he became a pragmatic Democrat along with other House freshmen who had national-security backgrounds. One ideological ranking of his first-term placed Kim among the 30 most conservative in his caucus.
He went viral on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, when pictures spread of him on his hands and knees cleaning up the Capitol after the attack.
By 2023, after then-Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) was indicted on corruption charges, Kim jumped into the Senate race against the wishes of the state’s seemingly entrenched establishment. He went to the Senate and upended the state’s power structure, while Menendez is now serving a federal prison sentence.
He’s not currently planning any bids for caucus leadership positions. He is, under current caucus rules, at least a decade or two away from chairing an influential committee.
He does not try to react to every big scandal or controversy of the moment, which is the usual path these days to cable TV hits and large social media followings. Instead, he is the rare senator who has plotted out long-term plans, sometimes even charting out 10-year objectives.
“I’m gonna be in this fight for as long as it takes. I just doubled the number of millennials here in the Senate on the Democratic side single-handedly,” he said.
The other Democratic millennial, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, has liberals swooning online with every clip of his reelection-campaign speeches, drawing talk of a 2028 presidential bid.
A diminutive son of Korean immigrants, Kim is not planning a presidential bid. Representing a blue state like New Jersey, he could serve in the Senate for decades to come.
“This is my life’s work,” he said of his new legislation.
Kim counts himself among the Democrats who believe that Trump has given them an opportunity to reenvision federal government programs. If Democrats gain full power, he doesn’t want to just recreate the U.S. Agency for International Development or restore cuts to Medicaid that came as part of the Republican 2025 domestic policy bill.
“Part of why Trump got elected is people were frustrated with the status quo,” he said. “They thought it was broken, and we need to show that, look, I also believe that the status quo is fundamentally broken, but here is a real idea that could have immeasurable impact.”
His MediKids proposal starts off with three Democratic co-sponsors: Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Alex Padilla of California.
Voters have a complicated view of government involvement in health care, as two liberal-leaning groups, the Searchlight Institute and Zeteo, found in a study released this month. Fewer than four-in-10 Democrats have confidence in the federal government to run a national health-insurance plan.
This issue has been the Democratic dream for decades. In 1971, after Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia defeated Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts for Democratic whip, Kennedy told reporters he would dedicate himself to the “cause of my life,” universal health care.
It took 38 years for the ACA to get passed and signed into law, six months after Kennedy died.
Kim already said in his inaugural speech on the Senate floor that his farewell address will include an assessment of whether he succeeded in expanding health care.
“I hope it doesn’t take that long because that would be a real detriment to the American people,” he said. “But for as long as I’m here, I’m going to be pushing on these ideas.”
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