Perspective

Ezra Klein offers it.

Howard Dean, the "liberal" candidate in 2004, offered a health plan that was considerably less liberal than the current proposal being discussed in Congress.

Liberals, God bless them, always want more than what they can get. And some see any failure to get that as evidence of a betrayal of liberal principles. If single payer were a serious proposal in the current plan, some of them would say that it doesn't go far enough.

Do the current proposals go far enough? No. But do they go far enough to achieve progress over what we have now? Yes.

And saying so isn't "settling".