What Democrats are really debating about Medicare-for-all

The core question is not whether we can afford a single-payer system. It's how much money we're willing to spend to avoid making big structural changes.

Benjamin Franklin.
(Image credit: Illustrated | tapui/iStock, AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Asya_mix/iStock, javarman3/iStock)

The Democrats have been spending an extraordinary amount of time debating what to do about America's health-care system. This is partly a reflection of political reality; health care was the main policy rallying cry that led the Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterms, and Democratic-leaning voters regularly say that health care is their top policy priority.

But that same political reality is skewing the health-care debate away from the central policy choices and toward an artificial dispute of less real substance than it appears.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.