Left-wing US Senator Bernie Sanders tabled new legislation on Tuesday that would provide government health insurance to all citizens.

The proposal by the former presidential hopeful — who lost out to Establishment favourite Hillary Clinton in last year’s Democratic primaries — would effectively expand the present Medicare scheme for pensioners to cover everyone.

Taxes would be determined by income, with the poorest paying nothing but the rich and profitable corporations contributing at higher rates.

Individuals and businesses would no longer pay premiums to private insurers.

The Bill, bringing it what is known as a single-payer system, is a noted improvement from the compromised Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

That greatly expanded coverage for the poor and ended penalties against the elderly and already sick, but mainly through the grotesquely inefficient and discriminatory private insurance sector.

President Donald Trump has vowed to scrap even those limited advances, with proposals also containing massive handouts to the rich. So far he has failed to get any of those Bills passed, however, and a new last-ditch Bill was due to be unveiled last night by right-wing Congressmen.

At least 12 other Democratic senators had signed onto Mr Sanders’s bill by Tuesday evening, including four potential presidential contenders: Kamala Harris of California, Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Several other Senate Democrats, including fellow presidential hopefuls Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, introduced a rival Bill that expands government health coverage by a far smaller degree.