The most conservative Senate Democrat wants to explore single-payer
by Dylan Scott at Vox
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/12/16297714/joe-manchin-medicare-for-all-single-payer
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Even those who aren’t yet on board with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s forthcoming Medicare-for-all legislation are proposing ideas that would expand the government’s role in health care. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) has a bill to allow people to buy into Medicaid. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is proposing to let people and business buy into Medicare. At the very least, senators like Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) want to allow older Americans not yet eligible for Medicare to join the program.
Sanders’s bill, meanwhile, is winning wide support from senators — like Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin — who wouldn’t necessarily be the first people you’d expect to back it.
Perhaps most importantly, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote, any Democratic senator with ambitions about running for president in 2020 is backing Sanders: Elizabeth Warren (MA), Kamala Harris (CA), Cory Booker (NJ), and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) among them.
Here’s how Matthews put it:
This is what an emerging party consensus looks like. Over time, some issues become so widely accepted within a party as to be a de facto requirement for anyone aspiring to lead it. No Democrat would run for president, or even for House or Senate minority leader, without supporting the DREAM Act. No Republican would try for a leadership position without supporting repeal of the estate tax.
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