Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a new version of his long-standing proposal to provide “Medicare for All,” creating single-payer health insurance system that ends the private insurance industry as we know it.

Unlike the last time Sanders introduced similar legislation, he will have a co-sponsor. And not just one. Several potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—and therefore, potential rivals to Sanders—have signed on, including Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren. (Senator Chris Murphy may as well, even though he’s shopping his own plan for letting people buy in to Medicare as a step toward Medicare for All.) Meanwhile, over in the House, single-payer legislation has, for the first time, a majority of the House Democratic Caucus on board.


The Democratic Party now is, for all intents and purposes, the party of single-payer health insurance.

Big mistake.

Democrats are committing themselves to years more of a treacherous health care debate, at a time when there are more pressing issues to confront. They are emulating Donald Trump’s penchant for quick-fix, bumper-sticker solutions that prove to be, in his own words, more “complicated” once in power. And instead of maintaining a candid relationship with its ideological base in order to temper expectations, the party establishment is indulging it, risking bitter disappointment in the future.

Note that I didn’t say single-payer is electoral suicide. I would have said so a year ago, but today I can’t say that with certainty. As any single-payer devotee will eagerly tell you, a July Quinnipiac poll found 51 percent of voters support such a system. When characterized as Medicare for All, a June Kaiser Health Tracking poll registered support at 57 percent. In the current era of polarized politics, where centrist voters are increasingly elusive, single-player would certainly energize progressive voters and could help Democrats woo back some economic populist Trump voters.

But single-payer hardly comes with an Election Day guarantee. More than 90 percent of voters support requiring background checks for gun buyers. More than 60 percent oppose a border wall. Fifty-six percent say America should “discourage the use of coal.” And yet, we have a president on the opposite side of all those issues.

Moreover, the top-line numbers don’t ensure that support can withstand attack. Kaiser’s poll analysts concluded: “The public’s attitudes on single-payer are quite malleable, and some people could be convinced to change their position after hearing typical pro and con arguments.”

For example, upon hearing the startling news that single-payer might “give the government too much control over health care,” support plummets to 40 percent. The revelation that the plan would “require many Americans to pay more in taxes” did the same. Maybe, just maybe, a Republican will give these talking points a try.

Or Republicans could dust off the classic attack used to derail Hillarycare in the early 1990s. That’s when the insurance lobby ran the devastating “Harry and Louise” ad, in which a middle-class couple surrounded by piles of unpaid bills complains that their government plan doesn’t cover what their old insurance did. Faced with such criticisms, single-payer proponents won’t be able to say in response, “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” They’ll have to defend letting a single government entity determine what’s covered and what isn’t.

Of course, that doesn’t mean conservatives will win the day. Single-payer forces may come up with the perfect rejoinders. But while the final outcome of such a health care battle on Election Day may not be certain, the brutality of the debate is not.

I can’t believe I have to remind anybody of this, but health care debates are always vicious. The Hillarycare push contributed to the Democratic loss of Congress in 1994. The passage of the Affordable Care Act fueled the Tea Party backlash that helped Republicans take the House in 2010, and lingering resentment buoyed Trump in 2016. Then the failed attempt at ACA repeal burned Republicans this year, sowing bitterness among conservative base voters and driving a wedge between the president and congressional leaders.

In other words, no party or ideological persuasion is safe from the health care buzz saw. Any proposal to alter, let alone completely transform, our complex health insurance system creates winners and losers, or at least, the perception thereof. And since health care affects us so personally, the perceived “losers” gain enormous leverage every time major reform is on the table.

The case for single-payer is simple: Everybody gets affordable health insurance so everybody wins! The only people that cry are insurance company executives. Besides, every other country has a government-run health insurance system, so why can’t we?

But as the New York Times’ health policy guru Margot Sanger-Katz warns, “Nearly any single-payer plan would require substantial disruptions in the current health care system, upending the insurance arrangements of the 156 million Americans who get their coverage from work, changing the way doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid, and shifting more health care spending onto the government ledger. Such a proposal would reshuffle the winners and losers in our current system.”

Sanger-Katz argued, as I did in July, that Medicare for All could easily end up being the Democrats’ version of “repeal and replace”: a “broadly popular slogan” that’s easier to say than to do. When grandiose promises on the campaign trail aren’t kept once attaining power, a party’s base becomes demoralized and recriminations follow.

The fact that a political goal is hard is not, in and of itself, reason to shirk from the task. If the goal is a moral imperative, then politicians should do all they can to achieve it. And universal coverage, a literal life-or-death issue, is a moral imperative.

However, single payer is not a moral imperative; it is just one means to an end. The ACA is another.

The framework is already built. The ACA’s individual mandate requires most to purchase insurance or pay a penalty, save for those with a hardship exemption. As a result, nearly 20 million more Americans are now covered. In 2016, 6.5 million chose the penalty instead of getting coverage (paying an average of $470), and another 12.7 million were exempted. Instead of building an entirely new system, a willing Congress could less dramatically and disruptively build on the current system, stiffening the penalties for noncompliance, increasing subsidies and pursuing further cost controls to eliminate the need for hardship exemptions.

Do you know who thought Obamacare was worth defending? Single-payer advocates like Sanders! As the New Republic’s Brian Beutler noted in June, the Machiavellian move for the left would have been to get out of the way, let Republicans destroy Obamacare and watch the health insurance markets turn to rubble. Then, Beutler wrote, “single payer will suddenly become much more urgent and politically viable.”

Instead, progressive populists and democratic socialists rallied to save the status quo of a regulated private insurance system. Why? Because they knew Obamacare saves lives.

So why should Democrats prioritize junking what was just successfully defended, at enormous political risk, when there are so many other moral imperatives that warrant a robust and urgent policy response?

Climate change is more than a life-and-death issue, it’s a planetary survival issue. Yet Democrats are not falling over each other to see who can most rapidly slash greenhouse gas emissions and stem the crisis.

Ending an immigration system that has created millions of second-class American denizens who lack voting rights and worker rights is a moral imperative. Trump’s toying with the lives of undocumented Dreamers galvanized Democrats last week. Yet this week, Democrats risk blunting that momentum by diving back into the health care cauldron.

Crumbling infrastructure risks lives and drags down the economy. Unaffordable early education and higher education exacerbates inequality. The opioid crisis is devastating communities. The globalized, automated “gig” economy fuels economic anxiety and insecurity.

But health care? That’s a battle Democrats have waged for three decades, paid enormous political prices and somehow managed to come out ahead. The Affordable Care Act is still standing. For Pete’s sake, Democrats. Pocket the win and move on.