"Medicare for All" is the critical platform upon which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is pitching his tent in this year's 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination campaign (oh, as well as free college, student debt writeoffs, and the green new deal).

Sanders ceaselessly shrugs off his critics that enacting such a universal healthcare system would be prohibitively expensive (not to say liberty-destroying) for a 'free nation'.

All of which raises the question - what's changed since 1987 when the then mayor of Burlington explained that giving everyone Medicaid for all would be too much of a financial burden for the United States to bear.

“But I think what we understand,” Sanders proudly proclaims: “Is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that. For example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a Medicaid card – we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation. ”

Wait what?!?