A new poll from Navigator Research — a progressive polling firm — shows that even among Democrats, a public option allowing people who want to buy into Medicare to do so is more popular than Medicare-for-all. Furthermore, most voters simply don’t understand what Medicare-for-all means:

Only one in five Americans are very confident they know what “Medicare for All” would mean for our health care system (18% very confident) or their personal health care (20% very confident). When asked to characterize what “Medicare for All” means to them, respondents are divided: 40% think “Medicare for All” would eliminate the private insurance market and require everyone to switch to Medicare, while 60% think it would let anyone buy Medicare who wants to, while allowing others to stay on their private insurance. Perhaps most fascinating: Democrats are most likely to think “Medicare for All” is a “buy-in” program, while Republicans are much more likely to believe it will eliminate private insurance.

Sanders’s opponents should be clear: “Under Medicare-for-all, if you like your plan, you can’t keep it.” That’s because only 47 percent support Medicare-for-all if it means eliminating private health insurance. (This is quite similar to polls done by the Kaiser Family Foundation and by the Center for American Progress.)

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Those who want to knock Sanders down a peg and/or save their party from making a huge political error should highlight this: Sanders will eliminate your private insurance. A public option allows you to buy into Medicare but also permits you to keep your plan if you like it.

There is another pragmatic argument to raise in the debates and out on the campaign trail for those Democrats who don’t want to follow the Sanders approach. Drew Altman explains that “universal coverage” isn’t going to mean 100 percent coverage under any scheme, in part because there are about 4 million illegal immigrants who aren’t going to get coverage even under Medicare. “Making people eligible for coverage or financial help does not assure they all get covered, and that would remain the case whether we expanded eligibility for subsidies, expanded Medicaid in more states, put in place reinsurance mechanisms, or revitalized outreach and enrollment efforts, to pick several of the incremental policies that have been proposed,” he writes. “A pragmatic definition of universal coverage through incremental measures might take us to something like 95% coverage of the non-elderly population. That’s a guesstimate; it could just as easily be 96% or 94%.”

So when we debate Medicare-for-all vs. a public option, we’re talking about difference of coverage of 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. And politically speaking, the Medicare-for-all scheme is simply never going to happen. “We could cover everyone from birth through a Medicare for All style plan. But for that to happen, progressive Democrats would have to have substantial control of the White House, the House and Senate — and overcome fierce interest group opposition,” Altman explains. “And to win passage, it’s possible that a political compromise would be necessary that would exclude coverage for the millions who are ineligible for coverage now due to their immigration status.”

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To sum up, someone on that stage next Thursday should make sure voters understand that Medicare-for-all doesn’t cover “all,” doesn’t allow you to keep your plan and doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance of becoming law. It’s indicative of much of the Sanders approach: Make the perfect the enemy of the good, take positions designed to put Democrats on defense and jettison the advantage that Democrats presently have on health care. Navigator’s poll shows, “Democrats in Congress have had an advantage on health care over Republicans in Congress, ranging from 6% to 16% (12% this month), and over President Trump, ranging from 12% to 20% (17% this month).” It really comes down to this: Do Democrats want to win or not?