Why America isn't catching single-payer fever

Ambitious Democrats are marching to Bernie Sanders' drum these days: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker — all Senators seeking the White House in 2020 — have signed onto the socialist senator's plan for socializing health insurance.

"Medicare for All" is Sanders' current euphemism. "Single-payer healthcare" is the standard euphemism. Single-payer, of course, means single-decider, and that decider is Uncle Sam. Sanders, who thinks Americans suffer from excessive choices of deodorant, is fine with centralizing medical decision-making in the hands of bureaucrats.

The Leviathan State is generally in vogue on the activist Left, where efforts are afoot to arm the government with police powers over hate speech and political speech, and their desire use government power to coerce participation in contraception and gay marriage.

The desire for power consolidation in this active progressive base helps explain the rush to single-payer, especially among otherwise corporatist neoliberals like Harris and Booker. But we also suspect that the Left's echo-chamber, and the bubble fortified by a complete dismissal of opposing views, leaves many Democrats with the false belief that socialized health insurance is or could be popular.

Consistently, most Americans say "government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses."