‘Medicare For All’ Is Turning Into A 2020 Litmus Test For Democrats
“Sherrod Brown has been calling for universal health care since 1992. That’s when he first ran for a U.S. House seat in Ohio, vowing to decline the federally subsidized insurance for members of Congress until his constituents could get similar coverage. He won that race and he kept that pledge, buying policies on his own until 2011, after the Affordable Care Act became law. He was a senator by that point, and like every other Democrat in the chamber, he voted for President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. But before Brown did that, he promoted a series of proposals designed to make the program more generous and comprehensive. One of them was a last-minute amendment that would have replaced Obamacare’s intricate scheme for competing private insurers with a ‘Medicare for all’ program, under which everybody would enroll in a government-run insurance plan.”