A couple explainers from Vox.
Cutting to the chase, lot's of different things. It's much more popular among liberals, sine it promotes equity. Less so among conservatives since it interferes with the market.
- The “pleasant ambiguity” of Medicare-for-all in 2018, explained.
- We read Democrats’ 9 plans for expanding health care. Here’s how they work.
As popular as Medicare-for-all is, the slightly more vexing question is what it actually means.
Historically, Medicare-for-all has meant single-payer health insurance, a national government-run program that covered every American and replaced private coverage entirely, similar to the government-run health care programs in Canada and some European countries.
Then-Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) first introduced the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act in 2003. Conyers has since been disgraced by sexual harassment allegations but the idea lives on. It’s now sponsored by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and it is still a single-payer proposal. So is Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill, a cornerstone of his unexpectedly resonant 2016 presidential campaign.
But these days, other plans are falling under the Medicare-for-all umbrella. Some progressives, like Green, are even comfortable with the term being applied to the various proposals to allow all Americans buy into Medicare. Some of those plans used to be branded as a “public option”; they would not end private insurance that more than half of Americans get, usually through work, as a true single-payer would. But these plans would also not provide the same guarantee of universal coverage that a single-payer system does.
“For anybody who supports Medicare-for-all single payer, what better way to debunk the right wing lies than to allow millions and millions of Americans to voluntarily opt into Medicare and love it?” Green told me in our interview. “As a political strategy, having Medicare-for-all be a broad umbrella where any candidate can embrace some version of it... that moves the center of gravity in the Democratic party.”
In 2018, with control of Congress at stake, nobody is taking up arms to insist that their version should be orthodoxy. What we know for certain is that Medicare-for-all is popular, and so Democrats of all stripes want to campaign on it. Governing comes later.
- For more: what is a single-payer system?
