In early 2020, all roads in American politics led to Medicare for All. The policy demand, shorthand for a universal, tax-funded, single-payer health insurance plan, began its ascent four years prior when it was elevated by Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign. Over the intervening years, its popularity soared, and debate became intense. By the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, everyone had an opinion, and where you stood seemed to say everything about your core values and fundamental worldview.
For the rising economic populist left, Medicare for All was the flagship demand — the purest expression of the Sanders movement’s ethos, promising to mobilize ordinary working-class people en masse, across lines of political and demographic difference, in a necessary challenge to capitalist domination and exploitation. The Medicare for All army came equipped with political arguments, economic projections, policy papers, physicians’ opinions, patient testimonies, and regiments of self-taught true believers ready to talk through the details with anyone who would listen. As the pressure mounted, centrists squirmed in their seats, conservatives clutched their pearls, and corporations benefiting from the private health insurance status quo commenced a lobbyist hiring spree, affirming with their dollars how seriously they took the threat.
Then, in mid-2020, poof. The demand for Medicare for All evaporated. Sanders’s primary loss and Joe Biden’s presidential victory squashed the momentum. By 2021, with the policy’s main champion defeated and an avowed opponent in the White House, the proposal migrated almost overnight from the center of the primary debate to the margins of respectable Democratic Party discourse. Even a public option, which Biden had promised to champion as a compromise, disappeared from discussion without a trace. When the Republicans, under newly reelected Donald Trump, set out inevitably to destroy Biden’s health care legacy, they…
Auteur: Meagan Day
