Or it would be if they hadn’t successfully tied it to political identity so much.

Medicare is specifically only for elderly people, not all.

Medicare for All is a proposed law (S.1129 and H.R.1384) that expands Medicare to be a comprehensive single-payer system for all Americans. It has fairly high bipartisan support in polls, but relatively few (and only Democrat) supporters in Congress.

Just my humble opinion, but it seems Medicare for all would only exacerbate the actual problem of medical costs being too high due to government subsidization. I'll take my down votes and go now...

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I will say that I recently had to deal with the medical system for a family member, and he was on decent private insurance. We actually would have received better care at a lower cost if he was on Medicare instead. N=1, of course.

I'm pretty sure that Medicare has been shown to be a more effective negotiator than the private insurers and generally operates more efficiently, but I may be misremembering.

Disclaimer that I don't support medicare for all myself, I'd much prefer a model closer to the NHS, with caveats (federal funding, county administration, state oversight).

Medicare for all would create the largest insurance pool the US has seen. It makes absolutely no sense why that would raise the costs.