Bernie Sanders and 16 Senate Dems just released their new single-player plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released his new single-payer health care bill on Wednesday with the support of 16 Democratic senators.

“This struggle will ultimately not be won here on Capitol Hill, but through grassroots activism all across this country,” Sanders said at a press conference, according to his prepared remarks. “The reality is that when millions of Americans stand up and fight back, when they become engaged politically, there is nothing that will stop us.”

The core idea of Sanders’s single-payer bill is that the government can and should pay for basically all medical treatments of the whole population. It treats how to pay for doing so largely as an afterthought, and promises to work backward from the premise of universal care. A shocking number of Senate Democrats have embraced the bill this week, with about a third signing on — an indicator to the bill’s supporters that the party may be finally willing to stand for the right of the poor to have health care, but a sign to the bill’s critics that Democrats are moving too far to the big-government left.

Read the bill in full here, or access it at this link:

Here’s where Vox places the 48 members of the Senate Democratic caucus on the Sanders bill ahead of its release: