This is a nice breath of fresh air to hear. Unfortunately, it appears that the vocal minority you mention are basically conservative congressmen or their boosters.

For now it may be conservative congresspeople but once a Universal Healthcare proposal starts gaining traction all the common support for the initiative will likely shatter. People will disagree on what the intended outcomes are (are they economic, empathy based, or both?), the implementation details, how to pay for it, etc...

Yeah, no. We had this fight when Obamacare was being hammered into shape. Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

Now, it's a bit more complicated than that, and single payer was never on the table because Obama decided to pre-capitulate in the futile hope of being able to tag the ACA as bipartisan, but it's only gotten worse. If a literal global pandemic doesn't bring people to their senses, I'm not sure what will. There's just too much money being funneled to incentivize our politicians to do the wrong thing (Sinema being an obvious example).

> Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

"Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation: https://ballotpedia.org/Obamacare_overview

But, what is useful here, is you've provided a fantastic example of the rhetorical devices and reduction we can expect to see.

I say that as a supporter of Universal Healthcare that both replaces and learns lessons from VA Medical.

> "Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation:

Are you under the impression that Manchin or the other Conservative Democrats support universal healthcare?

They do not.

There's really not that many of them. Secondary to that, which might be a bit pedantic, is I dislike "conservative" being used as a pejorative as I mentioned. It's not really an accurate reflection of what Manchin or others believe in or what the populations they're voting for are concerned with. As I also stated, I think it's a bit reductive.

Seventeen Centrist Democratic Senators voted with Trump to kill banking reform.

That does not sound like "not many" of them.

There are 48 Democratic senators and 2 independents. I'd have to look at why each of those 17 decided to vote against banking reform. It's not like it's as simple as "conservative" or "not conservative", which is exactly what I'm calling reductive.

Conservative Democrats have held the leadership roles in the party since the end of the Regan years.

>The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was a non-profit corporation founded in 1985 that, upon its formation, argued that the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. One of its main purposes was to win back white middle class voters with ideas that addressed their concerns. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

And liberal congressfolk, too, mind. That the behavior of Congress doesn't reflect the broad desires of the public is an ongoing problem -- Gilens & Page's 2014 "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" is a rough read -- and isn't strictly correlated to whether your tie is blue or red. That said, I do admit that we _also_ have a serious issue with the political class at the national level being split between folks that tack right as hard as they can and centrists that follow them because you gotta land where the "center" is.