Greg Sargent simplifies the question:

Public, government-run health care was key to not one, but both of Kennedy’s final health care initiatives.

One of these, of course, has already gotten lots of attention: The version of health care reform that emerged this spring from Kennedy’s Senate health and labor committee, which contained a public option.

But there’s another, oft-overlooked initiative Kennedy championed that makes the point even more strongly. I’m talking about the Medicare for All bill, which was wholly Kennedy’s baby.

Kennedy introduced Medicare for All in 2005 and 2007 and it never got voted out of committee. According to the Commonwealth Fund, a respected health care policy group, it was a “universal public insurance program” that would offer compulsory “Medicare type benefits” from cradle to grave. Public, government-run health care.

“It would have functioned similar to the way Medicare functions now,” Sarah Collins, a vice president at Commonwealth, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson. “It would have been basically a public health option, a single payer proposal.”