Medicare for All: Too risky a plunge

Listening to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown on Morning Joe yesterday makes me think that Medicare for All is too risky a plunge at this moment. Don’t see how union workers and others in the battleground states, where the race appears not only tight, but likely to decide who is the next occupant of the White House, will be convinced in the next several months to give up their private plans for a government plan. Many of them will say “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

And whatever misgivings they might have will only be magnified in a political environment where Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the Republican opposition will demagogically zero in on this “socialist, tax hiking, big government, heath care destroying” demand.

In this election there are no pyrrhic victories. There is nothing heroic about fighting the good fight. If we lose, we really lose. Neither piecemeal nor transformative demands for universal health care or anything else will have a place on the agenda in a Trump second term. We will be on the defensive and on the run.

Everything then, including the election platform of the current aspirants for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and the eventual nominee, should be subordinated to what it will take to win.

Perhaps I’m wrong here. But if so, I will only be persuaded by facts and sober minded politics, not slogans not revolutionary zeal.