Is the new and much ballyhooed "Medicare for All" plan from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., just like the GOP's shambolic effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare? Worse, is it akin to President Donald Trump's never-gonna-happen boast about Mexico paying for his border wall?

No, it is not. Yet those are the kind of critiques Sanders' effort has been subjected to in just the few days it's been before the public.

To review, Sanders this week – along with a host of other Democratic co-sponsors, many of whom are receiving 2020 attention already – released a bill that would, over the course of four years, transition just about everyone in America to one, government-run health care plan. That he's receiving any level of support in the upper chamber at all is quite the change from just a few years ago, when such an idea was considered so politically laughable that few elected officials would ever put their name on it.

The main ding on the plan thus far – leaving aside the conservatives who cry socialism at anything that expands government involvement anywhere – is that it doesn't grapple with a lot of the details that would need to be dealt with were single payer ever implemented.

For instance, it doesn't include a specific funding mechanism, i.e. the taxes that will be required; Sanders instead released a menu of financing options in a separate paper. It's also far more generous in terms of benefits than are the single-payer programs in other countries, leading to hand-wringing about how much it will cost and what sort of payments doctors and hospitals will receive if national health care spending is actually going to come down in the way the Sanders camp claims.

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Thus, we have the comparisons to the GOP's ill-fated Obamacare repeal, or the notion that Sanders moved the health care debate not one iota forward in real terms. His plan is being derided as a cheap political stunt, or worse, "snake oil" for self-sabotaging Democrats. The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell wrote, "the lesson the Democrats seem to have taken from the 2016 electoral trouncing is that they need to become more like Republicans. Meaning: Abandon thoughtful, detail-oriented bean-counting and attempts to come up with workable solutions grounded in (occasionally unpopular) reality, and instead chant virtue-signaling catchphrases."

Remember, the "repeal and replace" farce collapsed when it turned out that everything Republicans had been saying for eight years was built on a lie. Whereas the GOP had been promising better, cheaper health care for everyone, each piece of legislation it put out would accomplish precisely the opposite: Worse, more expensive health care for fewer people.

And therein lies the difference: Single payer isn't built on a lie. Unlike repeal and replace, it's clear in its intent. Not having every detail ironed out in the first week is not the same as spending eight years obfuscating your true intentions, telling the public you want one thing while writing bills that would do something else entirely. And it's certainly not comparable to Trump's wall, a transparent campaign stunt that's geopolitically absurd.

To me, the lesson of 2016 is not that the Democrats needs fewer details, but that they need an umbrella under which those details can reside. Voters need to know a candidate's overarching vision. "Medicare for All" is an aspiration, a signal of what Democrats want in a perfect world, a goal for American governance that is more than tweaks, twiddles and white papers.

Sanders' bill is clearly an opening bid, a grand gesture of what being a liberal means. It's OK if it doesn't include every little detail or acknowledge every political hurdle right off the bat. With a Republican Congress still firmly entrenched on Capitol Hill, it's not like urgency is much of an issue here.

In fact, had Sanders released a fully-fleshed out plan, I'm sure a critique would be that he was trying to foist his own personal vision onto the whole Democratic Party, rather than letting it work out the details in a more deliberative process.

This is what happens all too often on the left: Big ideas get kicked in the teeth and immediately treated as impossible, rather than as a goal that might happen someday if everyone got together and figured it out. Such ideas are assumed to inevitably doom Democrats at the ballot box, and thus must not be spoken of in polite company, as if 2016 didn't show that few prognosticators have any idea what the electorate really wants.

That whole line of thinking is not very inspirational, if you ask me. The circular firing squads will continue until morale improves!