Medicare for All's Surprising Origins in Health Care | Time

Medicare for All's Surprising Origins in Health Care | Time: Health-care reformers have settled on "Medicare for All" as the slogan for a number of different programs to expand health insurance.

“While Medicare was helpful to many patients who used it, critics said that
it didn’t cover all medical expenses, its payment policies were
overly complex and it still relied too much on private industry.”…

“However accurate single-payer might have been, it did not really catch on
outside health policy and activist circles. “It’s like trying to
sell a house by describing its plumbing,””…

“The new millennium brought a Republican administration and a resistance
to pursuing big health care changes. When President George W. Bush
created Medicare Part D, the legislation did not allow the federal
government to negotiate drug prices, leaving progressives feeling
frustrated and powerless against the growing power of the
pharmaceutical industry. Despite this, the rest of Medicare had substantially improved since its early days. Reforms to the program had brought down spending, and it now

had low administrative costs plus a demonstrated ability to control
prices, often giving it an advantage over private coverage. That made
it popular not only with recipients but also among lawmakers.”...

“...they signaled a coming change in strategy from the technical language of
single-payer to the aspirational message of expanding on Medicare to
create an even better system.”…

“...the advocates have said if you can’t get significant Republican
support or any Republican support, why don’t we do something we
really want to, like expanding Medicaid and Medicare?”…

“It’s not like people can come in and say let’s just do incremental
reform. We did try that,” ... “It’s not just that it didn’t
completely work, but it was so vulnerable to attack. The only way to
prevent that is to have full-scale comprehensive reform.”