Expanding Medicare

After reading the excellent Ezra Klein health care series, I want to second the major rhetorical proposal Ezra offers: pitching universal health care as "giving more people Medicare."

What really leapt out at me during this series was how normal government provided health care is... Americans have somehow fooled themselves -- or been fooled -- into believing that government-run health care is somehow different from what they enjoy now. I genuinely believe they carry some sort of dystopian vision around with them, of gray waiting rooms and faceless bureaucrats and bread lines with stethoscopes, rather than grain, at the front.

Americans need to be assured that government run health care is not, in some weird way, a wholly different state of affairs. They need to know that it's the health care they enjoy now, just better, cheaper, and guaranteed. Medicare, because it's already used and liked, comes with those benefits.