Democrats must pursue universal health care. They must also be smart about it.

Supporters need to be willing to take "yes" for an answer

Sen. Bernie Sanders.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

One thing that the Republican push to take health insurance from more than 20 million people has done is to dispel the illusions of many moderate Democrats. "If the American Health Care Act passes," argues Vox's Erza Klein, "Medicare for all" will power the Democratic Party after 2017. This is almost certainly correct. In fact, universal public insurance will be the consensus Democratic goal whether the AHCA passes or not.

The idea that the structure of ObamaCare would insulate it from political pushback was always based on a lie: that national Republicans would support good universal coverage as long as the market was involved. This has never been true. The Heritage Plan that is sometimes erroneously cited as the basic model for the Affordable Care Act was in fact a plan to replace Medicaid, Medicare, and employer-provided insurance with private insurance that would cover very little. Not only was it nothing like the ACA, in other words, it was an even more radically right-wing plan than TrumpCare. And while the legislation signed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts was actually similar to the ACA, laws passed by supermajorities of New England Democrats tell us absolutely nothing about what national Republicans support.

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Scott Lemieux

Scott Lemieux is a professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., with a focus on the Supreme Court and constitutional law. He is a frequent contributor to the American Prospect and blogs for Lawyers, Guns and Money.