Medicare for All: How To Get There

Clearly, a national single-payer health-care plan is best for the country. Equally clearly, the best model for such a plan is Medicare. Indeed, many advocates of single-payer refer to it by the shorthand term "Medicare for all".

One of the few legitimate objections to spreading the Medicare umbrella over everyone is that the rapid shock of it would cause massive dislocation in the insurance industry, affecting not only the corporations, their stockholders, and their poor, poor CEOs but also thousands of their employees.

So here's how to get the job done without the shock: Phase it in. The current threshold age for Medicare eligibility is 65. Make it 60 in 2011, 55 in 2012, 50 in 2013, and so on. After 13 years, it'll kick in at birth. That'll give everyone a chance to get used to it and provide lots of opportunities for working out the kinks.

Simple. Fair. Good for the grandkids as well as grandma. And doesn't require 1000 pages to explain.