By Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The progressive candidate, endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is now the nominee in a pivotal battleground race. He sold voters Medicare for All without premiums, deductibles, or copays; a wealth tax; the abolition of ICE; and the curtailment of military aid to Israel.
But the real story is the hypocrisy at the heart of his brand.
El-Sayed brands himself as a physician but has never practiced medicine. He rails against oligarchs and private capital while building a high-income household on elite credentials, podcast revenue, and his wife’s cash-only psychiatry practice.
This is a capitalist life with socialist theater.
El-Sayed earned an MD from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford. He calls himself a physician on the campaign trail, on LinkedIn, and in public appearances. Records in Michigan and New York show that he never obtained a medical license in either state. He never completed a residency, never passed specialty boards, and never practiced clinical medicine independently. His only hands-on clinical experience was a four-week sub-internship at the end of medical school — an experience he later described as “cosplaying a doctor.”
Here is the core contradiction.
Medical school is not a public utility. The years of deferred earnings, the competitive selection, the intellectual labor, and the credential itself constitute personal intellectual capital. In a free society, that capital belongs to the person who acquired it. El-Sayed exercised precisely that ownership. He decided the MD was his private property. He chose not to finish residency, not to obtain a license, not to see patients, and instead redirected the credential into public-health administration, academia, podcasting, consulting, and politics. That is a capitalist decision. He treated his own human capital the way a property owner treats an asset: he controlled its use.
Socialism rejects that premise.
Under the logic El-Sayed now advances — Medicare for All and the broader project of socialized medicine — medical training is a collective resource. Society “needs” doctors. Training slots are scarce and publicly subsidized in various ways. The expectation is that the graduate will practice and deliver care. The individual cannot retain full ownership over what to do with the degree. If El-Sayed truly believed the socialist framework he champions, society was owed a practicing physician. The medical-school seat was not his private instrument to convert into a political brand and a six-figure media career.
He cannot have it both ways.
He exercised capitalist ownership over his own MD while demanding a system that would deny that same ownership to every other physician. The man who never entered the operating room or clinic wants to set the terms of employment for those who did.
Medicare for All does not function if physicians can walk away from it, as El-Sayed’s wife has. Coverage that is “accepted everywhere,” as El-Sayed’s campaign puts it, is not a slogan. It is a participation requirement. A card that is good at every clinic is worthless if the clinic can say no.
He does not have to pass a statute that conscripts doctors to get there. He has already described the indirect route. In November 2025 he wrote that Medicare for All “would create a monopsony which would instantaneously create a disciplining feature against rising prices.” A monopsony is one buyer. The buyer sets the price. The physician-seller’s alternative is not another insurer. It is exit: retire, open a cash-only practice, or leave. His campaign now says private coverage through unions or employers need not be banned, only made “redundant and unnecessary.” That is the same mechanism in softer language. If the public plan is automatic, comprehensive, and priced at zero to the patient, the private payer is not a market. It is an appendix.
If enough physicians opt out anyway, direct force follows. Condition hospital privileges on participation, ban balance billing, restrict private contracts. He has not campaigned on a draft. He has campaigned on a design that only works if physicians cannot leave. The man who treated his own MD as private property is asking for a system in which that option is, at minimum, economically empty — and, if the design fails, legally closed.
His family finances follow the same pattern.
El-Sayed and his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, reported $686,069 in total income for 2025 — $130,749 in wages, $262,299 in capital gains, and $292,881 in additional income from his podcast and her practice. That places the household in the top one percent of Michigan earners. Their net worth has been estimated as high as $2.1 million. Disclosures list rental properties in Ann Arbor, Bangalore, and Dubai, with associated rental income and a liability to a luxury Dubai real-estate developer.
Jukaku’s practice, which she is free to pursue, Mind Work Psychiatry, accepts no insurance — not Medicare, not Medicaid, not private plans. Patients pay cash. She previously worked at a university system that accepted Medicare and then opted out for her private practice. El-Sayed campaigns on healthcare “from cradle to grave” accepted everywhere, without cost-sharing. His wife’s model is the opposite: selective, fee-for-service care available only to those who can afford it. Is that an opt-out he would leave standing for his own household while making it unworkable for everyone else?
The podcast that helped generate six-figure outside income adds even another layer. El-Sayed once said he broadly rejected advertisements for products making health claims and criticized others for selling unproven remedies. He then read paid ads for retailers of “Moon Juice Brain Dust” and “Royal Jelly Brain Fuel,” and for an Israeli metabolic device called Lumen, while invoking medical credentials he never used in clinical practice.
El-Sayed now insists he is a “capitalist” even as he advances the full Sanders agenda of wealth taxes, expansive entitlements, and government-run healthcare. The American system that produced a Rhodes Scholar, an Ivy League MD, podcast revenue, consulting fees, capital gains, and foreign real-estate holdings is the same system he portrays as rigged by monopolies and oligopolies.
To me, a surgeon, the diagnosis is familiar: selective socialism, a chronic condition that always presents the same way — private ownership for the insider, collective control for everyone else.