Things being what they are, a single-payer health care plan couldn’t possibly be enacted into law by congress. Consequently, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a progressive presidential candidate to avoid proposing such a plan in order to out something feasible on the table. That said, most progressive-minded policy experts actually think a single-payer system would be equitable and effective. Policy experts like Judy Feder, professor of public policy at Georgetown University.
In addition to being a professor, Feder is the Democratic Party’s nominee in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. And in addition to putting forward a non-single-payer health care plan, the Obama campaign once released an ad touting his plan as falling between two equally pernicious extremes. The incumbent, in the VA-10, Frank Wolf, has an ad in heavy rotation that mentions neither his party affiliation nor Feder’s, but instead touts him as a “problem solving centrist” while deriding Feder’s health plan as “extreme” — with the quote attributed to none other than Barack Obama.
<http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/the_wages_of_centrism.php>
And for one of the early examples of accountability, he says "n the event that Obama and Wolf both win, I hope someone in the Obama political operation will take some time to consider whether the gains they made in the polls by trashing a perfectly good progressive health care plan were really worth the cost of helping to sink a promising progressive challenger."
Shane