The New York Times is looking for trouble among Democrats and has settled on the obvious: healthcare reform, and how the nation is going to expand access to quality, affordable health care for everyone. In its reporting, we learn that the Medicare-for-all single-payer system proposed by Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and others is "radical."
Which would be news to the rest of the developed world, which is providing care with much better outcomes at much lower costs with such systems. It's also news to the American voter, with whom it's actually pretty popular and certainly an idea that they would consider. Which means not only is it not radical, but it's something Democrats need to be talking about and educating voters on.
There isn't deep division among Democratic hopefuls on this issue, but there is a question of vision. Amy Klobuchar and Sherrod Brown, for instance, are approaching this more incrementally. Neither rules out single-payer as a potential and good final position, but they're not ready to go there now. "It could be a possibility in the future," Klobuchar said in a CNN town hall on Monday night. "I'm just looking at something that will work now." Brown says, "I want to help people now, and helping people now is building on the Affordable Care Act." That's absolutely valid, and the promise of protecting people's health care in the immediate term is crucial. But it's also a given with any Democratic nominee.
After a decade of assault from the Right on an incremental approach on health care, which the Affordable Care Act most certainly is, there's not much to lose politically by being aspirational on this issue. Running on Medicare for all, embracing the idea, and having an honest discussion about how it works and how we get there is something the American voting public is ready to hear. It's abundantly clear in the age of Trump that trying to moderate on some of these fundamental issues in hopes of wooing away his voters is a fool's errand.
Campaigns are the time to be aspirational, the time to set out the grand vision. Americans are ready to hear it, more ready than they've been in a few generations. That's especially true of Democratic primary voters.