When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won, the current moment may prove to be a crucial turning point in their narratives, albeit one contained, most likely, in the earlier chapters.

Scholars will have to probe why single payer emerged with such potency
at this moment. Proponents have been steadfastly advancing the cause for decades, but it took Bernie Sanders’s insurgent primary campaign to push single payer into the political spotlight.

And it was only last year, amid all the lurid dysfunction and savagery of Trump’s first months in office, when activists helped thwart the Republicans’ Obamacare repeal efforts while simultaneously achieving a historic advance for Medicare for All. For the first time, single-payer bills won support from a majority of Democrats in the House, and — after Sanders’s new bill launched in September — more than a third of those in the Senate. More and more legislators, it seems, knew which way the wind was blowing.