Jon Walker writes in The Week that single-payer enthusiasts need to change their tactics, because trying to placate doctors and hospitals creates insoluble political problems: “By letting hospitals and specialists keep so much money, it makes it very difficult to make Medicare-for-all a clear financial winner for everyone else . . . A strategy that gives hospitals so much money you need big tax increases but not enough to buy their support is a loser.” Presumably, though, those tactics were adopted because the alternatives — even bigger tax increases, or a frontal attack on hospitals and doctors — look like even bigger losers.


What Walker’s analysis suggests, then, is something he doesn’t want to face: There is no set of tactics that is going to make single-payer a near-term or medium-term likelihood.