Abdul El-Sayed wants you to believe he’s one of you. The Michigan Senate candidate, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, says he’ll deliver Medicare for All “from cradle to grave.” He says he’s the only candidate who will abolish ICE. He says the system is rigged against working people and he’s the guy to fix it.
Then you look at his own house.
His wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, is a psychiatrist. She runs her own practice, Mind Work Psychiatry, out of Ann Arbor. The kicker? She doesn’t take Medicare. She doesn’t take Medicaid. She doesn’t take insurance of any kind. If you’re a senior on Medicare who needs a psychiatrist, you can’t see Dr. Jukaku unless you pay out of pocket, in full, no reimbursement.
Jukaku used to work at the University of Michigan’s health system, which does accept Medicare. She left, started her own practice in 2024, and by March 2025 had formally opted out of the program entirely. This is not a mere oversight; this is an intentional business decision.
Here’s where it gets rich. El-Sayed has spent his entire campaign trail accusing doctors who won’t take Medicaid of discriminating against Black patients, saying those doctors treat people like “half citizens.” That’s his language, not ours. So by his own standard, what does that make the household he sleeps in every night?
This is the same guy running on Medicare for All, a system that would force every doctor in America to take government insurance whether they like it or not. Meanwhile the doctor closest to him has already decided that system isn’t good enough for her own practice. She wants cash-paying patients who can afford her rates without a government check involved. That is the exact arrangement wealthy progressives claim to despise when a Republican does it.
Then there’s the money. El-Sayed and Jukaku released their 2025 tax returns showing combined income of $686,069, with an adjusted gross income of $675,246. That’s not upper-middle-class. That’s the top one percent of Michigan households, a state where you need just over $611,500 to crack that bracket. The couple also disclosed a rental property in Bangalore, India, worth up to a quarter million dollars, and El-Sayed initially sought to delay his financial disclosure past the primary, citing his wife’s overseas family holdings.
Here we have a Senate candidate campaigning against the wealthy and the system that protects them, whose household cleared more money last year than roughly 99 percent of the state he wants to represent, funded in part by a doctor’s practice that won’t take the very government insurance he’s promising to expand to everyone else.
This is the pattern with the whole DSA class of candidates dressing up socialism as populism. They talk about abolishing ICE and opening the door to anyone who shows up. They talk about slapping government control on grocery stores and transportation because they’ve decided ordinary people can’t be trusted to navigate a free market. They talk about Medicare for All like it’s a moral emergency. But when it’s their own household, their own income, their own medical practice, the rules suddenly don’t apply.
Working families in Michigan know what it’s like to sit on a waitlist for a psychiatrist because nobody in network is taking new patients. They know what it’s like to choose between the electric bill and a prescription. Sarah Jukaku doesn’t have to know any of that, and neither does the man who wants to represent all of them in the United States Senate.
You don’t get to build a career off the outrage of the working class while your own house cashes out at the top one percent and turns away their insurance card. Michigan voters should ask Abdul El-Sayed a simple question before the primary: if Medicare for All is good enough for the rest of us, why isn’t it good enough for the doctor in your own home?
That’s not a gotcha: that is the whole ballgame. Voters deserve leaders who live by the policies they preach, not ones who write checks for socialism while cashing in on capitalism at home.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any views expressed within the following article are solely those of the author and are not a direct reflection of any official stance of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
