Industry battles Medicare for All traction

Health insurers and hospitals are starting to sweat.

Medicare for All and other proposals to give more Americans the choice to enroll in government-funded insurance programs have little chance of going anywhere under a Republican-controlled Senate and White House. Yet the insurance and hospital industries are taking seriously the threat to the status quo upon which they’ve built their businesses.

That the healthcare industry’s most powerful lobbyists were quick to form the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future to launch a preemptive strike against Medicare for All-style proposals is testament to their jitters and the fact that the momentum behind the concept is picking up. Once a fringe idea supported by the extreme left, Medicare for...