Medicare for All Is Not Socialized Health Care; It is Socialized Health Insurance, and that Is a Good Thing

Last week, the Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging it to overturn the Affordable Care Act once and for all. Nobody was really surprised by the action — Trump has been trying to get rid of “Obamacare” for years. But people were surprised that he would do this during a national pandemic. Depriving millions of Americans of their health care — for all the personal satisfaction it would give the President — is not a normal election-year response to a health crisis. The optics are terrible.

But Trump had little choice. He is about to be judged by the American people on his accomplishments over the past four years, and, well, he doesn’t really have any. The signature issues that swept him into power in 2016 were building a border wall and getting rid of Obamacare. The border wall was a bust. By the end of 2019, Trump had managed to construct 93 miles of the great wall — 90 of which replaced existing structures, for a grand total of three miles of new border wall in 3 years.

For a while it looked like Trump would still have a good economy to run on, but the biggest recession since World War II has taken the shine off of that argument. And a series of disappointing rulings by conservative Supreme Court justices has cast…