If you asked me to create a schematic for the health care plans proposed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, it would probably look something like this:



In case you missed it — Warrencare and Petecare are, as proposed, structurally identical. Both are split into two phases. In phase one of both plans, the president passes a public option. Then, in phase two of both plans, private insurance potentially goes away, though in both plans phase two is entirely contingent — in Warrencare on passing a second bill, and in Petecare on the withering away of private markets.

Medicare for All, meanwhile, has a completely different structure: it combines the public option and the abolition of private insurance into a single bill. To put it another way, Medicare for All has no contingent phase two.

Bizarrely, however, this extremely simple and intuitive approach is not how we have been talking about the candidates’ health care plans. Instead, our discourse has come to describe them essentially like this: