NASHUA – One clear difference in the candidates battling for the Democratic presidential nomination is the approach to health care: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want to increase federal spending by about $20 trillion to fund a Medicare for All plan, while former Vice President Joe Biden favors a $750 billion public option as an expansion of Obamacare.

A pair of New Hampshire first-in-the-nation (#FITN) primary polls released this week seem to indicate a close race among the aforementioned candidates, as well as Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg. Both the Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll, as well as the Emerson College poll, show these four candidates far ahead of everyone else on the Democratic side in the Granite State.

For his part, Buttigieg said his approach to health care is “Medicare for All … Who Want It,” a strategy similar to Biden’s, although Buttigieg estimates the price tag for his plan at $1.5 trillion.

“The Democratic voters have taken a look at Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and they appear unsatisfied at this time which brought some voters back to Bernie Sanders while others are now moving to a fresh face in Pete Buttigieg. This demonstrates the fluidity of the race,” Director of Emerson Polling Director Spencer Kimball said.

The Polls

The Suffolk/Boston Globe featured responses from 500 likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters, solicited from Thursday to Sunday via live telephone interviews. The results were as follows:

• Undecided – 21%

• Bernie Sanders – 16%

• Elizabeth Warren – 14%

• Pete Buttigieg – 13%

• Joe Biden – 12%

• Tulsi Gabbard – 6%

• Andrew Yang – 4%

• Kamala Harris – 3%

• Tom Steyer – 2%

• Cory Booker – 2%

No other candidate registered at least 2%.

The Emerson poll, meanwhile, took responses from 549 registered New Hampshire voters from Friday to Tuesday. A key difference in this poll is that “undecided” was not an option. Results show:

• Bernie Sanders – 26%

• Pete Buttigieg – 22%

• Elizabeth Warren – 14%

• Joe Biden – 14%

• Tulsi Gabbard – 6%

• Andrew Yang – 5%

• Kamala Harris – 4%

• Tom Steyer – 3%

• Amy Klobuchar – 2%

• Cory Booker – 2%

Health Care

Sanders, who won the 2016 New Hampshire primary with more than 60% of the vote, states on his website: “Create a Medicare for All, single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service. No networks, no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, no surprise bills.”

Via Twitter, the U.S. senator from Vermont added, “87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Tens of thousands die each year because they don’t have insurance. 500,000 go bankrupt a year due to medical bills. It’s not enough to tinker around the edges. We must pass Medicare for All.”

Warren recently slightly backtracked on her idea of immediately pushing for $20 trillion in new federal spending to cover Medicare for All. She now states this would be complete within her first term.

“The way I see it, this is about our values. No American should ever die because they couldn’t afford the care they need. No family should ever go broke because of health care costs. We need a health care system that reflects our values. That’s #MedicareForAll,” Warren stated via Twitter last week.

Meanwhile, Biden and his campaign team members are attacking the Medicare for All strategy. On his website, Biden states his public option plan to expand Obamacare will provide health coverage to “more than an estimated 97% of Americans.”

Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield continued going after Warren and Sanders on Tuesday.

“The Medicare for All plans that Senators Warren and Sanders are proposing will not only cost 160 million Americans their private health coverage and force tax increases on the middle class, but it would also kill almost 2 million jobs — and that’s according to one of Senator Warren’s own policy advisers,” Bedingfield said.

“Joe Biden has put forward a better vision for how we can move forward on health care, by giving everyone the choice to buy-in to a Medicare-like public option and expanding access and subsidies to make health care affordable for all Americans,” she added.

As for Buttigieg, he said his $1.5 trillion plan would be funded by, “rolling back the Trump corporate tax cuts, which will generate $1.4 trillion in revenue, and the rest from cost savings that result from empowering the federal government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.”

“We must ensure that everyone has an affordable option for health coverage that guarantees access to care when they need it,” Buttigieg added.

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