Medicare IS socialism. Medicare takes from each according to ability (workers) and gives to each (roughly) according to his need (retirees). It is a very popular form of socialism, at least among those who have it.
Yet the right has cynically used the excellent care that seniors receive because of Medicare as a way to fight health care reform. They scare seniors into thinking that the government will push grandma into an early grave if they have a publicly financed health care system, hoping that seniors won't notice that they already have a publicly financed health care system, that they mostly like it, and that it hasn't pushed anyone into an early grave. They are counting on Americans, especially older Americans, to not connect the dots.
In this article by neo-con Mark Steyn, Steyn argues that the U.S. system is superior to other socialist systems because senior citizens get much better health care in the U.S. than in other countries. Like most neo-cons, he argues that if the U.S. adopts a socialist system then grandma will die a slow, painful death at the hands of government bureaucrats.
Guess what he leaves out? Not once in the article is the word Medicare mentioned. He deliberately misleads the readers to believe that seniors are getting such care because of the "free market", when in reality they are being helped by a very generous amount of socialist government spending.
The right has a very cynical plan to use Medicare to frighten seniors into opposing universal health care. They compare the generous benefits that seniors receive in the United States to the less generous benefits that they receive in other countries and lead them to believe that "socialist medicine" will take away their benefits. They hope that they will be too ignorant to connect the dots and realize what Medicare is and where Medicare comes from.
And they have largely gotten away with this because of the political clumsiness of the Democrats. Medicare-for-all would be an easy political sell that would require a one page bill reducing the minimum age for Medicare to 0.
Unfortunately, after an overwhelming electoral victory, the Democrats still insist on playing on Republican turf. Medicare-for-all would not be cheap, but the Democrats are too concerned that they would be accused of raising taxes that they miss what should be a political slam dunk. Instead, the Democrats have talked about how much money the plan will save and how little taxes will go up. This leads the right wing attack that the Democrats will push grandma into an early grave.
The right does not fight with logic. They fight with emotion. Deficits do not matter to them, only winning the next election. These are the people who gave us a war, a massive expansion of Medicare, and a tax cut at the same time. These are the people who took the country from a surplus to a record deficit. The Democrats keep bringing knives to these political gunfights. They do themselves no favors by pushing fiscal responsibility as a primary part of their politics, not when it can be used to accuse them of denying old people medicine.
If for no other reason, Medicare-for-all should be proposed to call the Republicans' bluff on health care. Republicans HATE Medicare and really have no problem with denying care that isn't cost effective, but they can't exactly say that in public. A Medicare-for-all proposal would give the Democrats the moral high ground and force the Republicans to complain about the cost. The Republicans would be forced to choose between negotiating in good faith or becoming even more irrelevant. That's what I call a win-win situation.