Bernie Sanders is blocking cancer treatment for kids for his own selfish reasons

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Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a Starbucks protest Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders voted against legislation that would make it easier for children with cancer to get access to drug treatments and clinical trials. Stephen Yang for the NY Post

Ebenezer Scrooge has nothing on Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is thwarting cancer treatment for kids in a possibly futile attempt to get Congress to pass his priorities.

Last week, the Vermont socialist was the sole vote opposed to fast-tracking legislation that will make it easier for kids with cancer to access treatments and clinical trials and incentivize companies to develop pediatric therapies.

His complaint: the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act, named for a teen cancer patient who died while advocating for its passage, is a pared-down version of a previous package that included other health-care measures as well, including funding for community health centers.

Without those add-ons, he’s withholding support of a bill that was teed up to pass easily — and that even he otherwise supported.

Yet without his vote, it didn’t win unanimous backing, so it’ll now have to make its way through a much more arduous procedural process when Congress reconvenes next year.

That is, Sanders blocked an urgently needed bill in a perhaps futile attempt to get his pet projects passed.

Pray it doesn’t cost the lives of any kids who could’ve benefited. But make no mistake: This is super-villain behavior, as more rational lawmakers pointed out.

Right-wing Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also supports funding community health centers, fumed: “To say that you’re not going to give a chance for children to have a cure for cancer if you don’t get what you want” is “selfish” and “tragic.”

Amen to that.

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Too many hard-lefties think that way: Zero compromise, zero realism; just legalistic, ideology-driven insistence that things get done their way — or else. (Exhibit A: the recent government shutdown.)

Sanders has been similarly loony about data centers, claiming they’ll cost jobs. It’s the kind of logic that would have kept the world driving horse-pulled buggies.

Sanders has already made sick kids the victims of his reckless ideology; progress itself is next on the menu.

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