In three competitive Senate races — those in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota — Democratic candidates endorsed Medicare for All, which would kick scores of millions of Americans off their employer-provided plans and off the Medicare Advantage plans chosen by senior citizens. Surveys consistently show that most people are satisfied with their coverage and would not want to have to drop it for a new government plan. Surveys have also shown that most people, including many people who think they support Medicare for All, don’t know that the plan would force them to participate.
Many Democrats have acknowledged that this feature of Medicare for All is a political vulnerability. That’s why disagreements about health care featured in the Michigan Democratic primary and in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. It’s why Abdul El-Sayed periodically pretended that his plan would let people keep their private health insurance. Democrats worried about the issue remember that Obamacare’s lowest moment came when it imposed a fraction of the disruption to Americans’ existing health arrangements that Medicare for All would.
Now that the races are over, with the Republicans losing or on track to lose in all three, you might think we could evaluate how well their attacks on the Democrats over this issue landed. Except that Republicans didn’t attack them on the issue at all. (They ran one ad in Maine, saying the plan would deprive union members of union-negotiated plans: a good hit, but one that affected a much smaller group of voters than Republicans could have gone after.) Never mind that in Michigan, for example, nearly a fifth of the voting-age population is on a Medicare Advantage plan that El-Sayed has been quite open about abolishing.
Could some of these Senate races have been turned around if Republicans had raised this issue? We’ll never know.