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Asked about the piece Thursday morning, Sanders highlighted, as he does frequently on the campaign trail, the fact that the richest three people in the country -- billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – hold more wealth than the bottom-half of Americans, and cited statistics that showed the issue was even more dire for African-Americans.

\"You have massive racial inequalities where the average white family has ten times more wealth than the average black family, massive disparities in education, red-lining in housing, financial services and so forth,\" he said. \"So as a nation, we have got to address both issues. We have to deal with the overall issue of inequality in America. We have to deal with the racial inequality as well.\"

With health care reform efforts dominating much of President Donald Trump's first term in office and becoming the number one issue for voters during the 2018 midterm elections during which Democrats made sweeping gains on Capitol Hill, Sanders has made his signature Medicare-for-all plan a centerpiece of campaign.

In the \"GMA\" interview, the senator responded to criticisms that the plan -- which goes further than those of many of his Democratic primary rivals by calling for the elimination of private insurance -- was one rooted in corporate interests.

\"PHOTO:
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via AP
PHOTO: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at Discovery Green on Wednesday, April 24, 2019, in Houston.
>

\"The critique is coming from the insurance companies and the drug companies who will spend tens and tens of millions of dollars to maintain a dysfunctional health care system which makes huge profits for them while 80 million Americans today either have no health insurance or are underinsured with high deductibles and high co-payments,\" he said.

On the issue, earlier in the morning, Sanders' campaign announced that he would be making a trip to Canada later this month to highlight the increasing prices of prescription drugs in the U.S.

In what will be the first foreign trip of his 2020 presidential campaign, the senator will join a bus of type 1 Diabetes patients on a drive from Detroit to Canada, where the patients will purchase insulin at what is expected to be a lower price than what they would find in the U.S. The trip is inspired by a bus trip Sanders’ took two decades ago when he accompanied breast cancer patients into Canada to buy prescription drugs at similarly reduced prices.

Sanders’ fight for lowering prescription drug costs has not been short lived. He introduced legislation earlier this year to allow Medicare to negotiate discounted drug costs by giving patients, pharmacists and wholesalers to buy prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized countries.

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