Biden’s implicit argument to Democrats, meantime, is he has embraced enough of the policies animating the party’s ascendant left to make him acceptable as the standard-bearer — but not enough to alienate the working class voters the party desperately wants to win back in 2020.

He has embraced raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a posture that advances on Hillary Clinton’s stutter-step approach to raising wages in 2016, and he has touted a plan to allow anyone to go to community college free.

But he has spurned others, calling for improvements to Obamacare but declining to back a Medicare-for-all plan backed by many of his party’s 2020 candidates. Rather than railing on the wealthy, he takes pains to point out they, too, are good people. While he has talked about the need to address climate change, he has yet to embrace anything approaching the Green New Deal.....

Her sentiment was echoed at Biden’s first public campaign event in Pittsburgh during his introduction by the head of the international firefighter’s union.

“Let me shoot straight with you, and this might not be popular in parts of the Democratic Party,” said union president, Harold Schaitberger. “We can’t have a nominee that’s too far left. It’s just that simple. A candidate that has high-minded ideals, maybe honorable ideas, but little chance of winning.”

Costs.

Government spending on health care would increase substantially under a single-payer system because the government (federal or state) would pay a large share of all national health care costs directly. Currently, national health care spending—which totaled $3.5 trillion in 2017—is financed through a mix of public and private sources, with private sources such as businesses and households contributing just under half that amount and public sources contributing the rest (in direct spending as well as through forgone revenues from tax subsidies). Shifting such a large amount of expenditures from private to public sources would significantly increase government spending and require substantial additional government resources. The amount of those additional resources would depend on the system’s design and on the choice of whether or not to increase budget deficits. Total national health care spending under a single-payer system might be higher or lower than under the current system depending on the key features of the new system, such as the services covered, the provider payment rates, and patient cost-sharing requirements.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the two longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president.

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday that they were taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter, and that it came as a surprise to them that he had such concerns. Until they received the letter, they believed Mueller was in agreement with them on the process of reviewing the report and redacting certain types of information, a process that took several weeks. Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page memo to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.

Three and a half years after Vermont’s then-Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law a vision for the nation’s first single-payer health system, his small team was still struggling to find a way to pay for it. With a deadline bearing down, they worked through a frozen, mid-December weekend, trying one computer model Friday night, another Saturday night, yet another Sunday morning.

If they kept going, the governor asked his exhausted team on Monday, could they arrive at a tax plan that would be politically palatable? No, they told him. They could not.

Two days later, on Dec. 17, 2014, Shumlin, who had swept into office promising a health care system that left no one uninsured, announced he was giving up, lamenting the decision as “the greatest disappointment of my political life so far.”

The trajectory of Green Mountain Care, as Vermont’s health system was to be known — from the euphoric spring of 2011 to its crash landing in late 2014 — offers sobering lessons for the current crop of Democrats running for president, including Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), most of whom embrace Medicare-for-all or other aspirations for universal insurance coverage.