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When Sen. Bernie Sanders regales his campaign crowds with a portrait of The Way Things Are Going to Be, his “Medicare for All” program takes center stage. In a Sanders administration, the candidate promises, every man, woman, and child in America will share in a government-run, government-funded health-care system.But the single-payer system that Sanders is evangelizing isn’t just a figment of progressive utopian fantasies. Single-payer health care has already been tried—and failed—in Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where the proposal collapsed under its own weight last year before it was ever implemented.Deciding why it failed in Vermont is key to whether you buy into the candidate’s promise to extend the program nationwide.According to critics, from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman to USA Today’s editorial board, Sanders’s single-payer plan is something between a well-intentioned fool’s errand and a political pipe dream, an unrealistic idea that has been proven not to work in the senator’s own backyard.But closer to home, activists say Vermont’s failure even to implement its plan for universal health care was a failing of political will, not the policy itself. In better hands, they say, the policy can still work. To know the difference, it’s important to understand how Vermont got so close to single-payer in the first place.
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Topic: Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Health Care Plan Failed in Vermont (Read 473 times)
