CONCORD, N.H. —One after another, voters at a recent campaign event here for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. expressed utter comfort with the centerpiece of his health care platform: an idea once so controversial that Democrats had to drop it from the Affordable Care Act to get the landmark law passed.
The proposal would allow people of all incomes who aren’t old enough for Medicare to choose health coverage through a new government-run plan that would compete with private insurance, known by the less-than-catchy shorthand “public option.”
A decade ago, the issue created such deep internal divisions among Senate Democrats that they ultimately dropped the idea from their bill, even though the public option was strongly favored by many liberals and a majority of House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But now, with two of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, calling for a government-controlled single-payer “Medicare for all” system as they compete for support of the party’s liberal wing, a public option is looking like a safe moderate position and even a realistic policy goal.
Not only are most of the other Democratic presidential candidates proposing some version of it, but Ms. Warren, facing trepidation over her $20 trillion single-payer plan, now says she would start her presidency by pushing for a public option and would wait until her third year in office to seek “Medicare for all.”
During the Democratic candidates’ debate on Wednesday, as Mr. Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., warned again that “Medicare for all” would mean taking away the choice of private insurance, Ms. Warren said her intent was to create a public option first to “get as much help to the American people as we can as fast as we can.”
About two-thirds of voters like the idea of a public option or Medicare buy-in, according to several recent national polls. This month, the Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, which has asked voters about the plan four times since July, found that 65 percent of the public favors the idea, compared with 53 percent who support “Medicare for all.” Large majorities of Democrats and independents favored a public option in Kaiser’s November poll, as did 41 percent of Republicans — roughly the same level as earlier Kaiser polls found but down from an unusual spike of 58 percent in October.
“I think our goal should be to try to get everybody in America to have health insurance, and I think the easiest and fastest way is what Vice President Biden is proposing — to have the public option.” said Dr. Alexandra Argasinski, 56, an internist who buttonholed Mr. Biden about his plan here in Concord after he served chili with firefighters.
Polls suggest that some voters have become unnerved by the price tags of the Warren and Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plans and the fact that they would abolish private health insurance. Support for such an approach has narrowed in recent months, as people have begun to understand what it would involve. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll of voters in four battleground states — Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found that 62 percent of those who are undecided or are still persuadable believe that “a national Medicare-for-all plan that would eliminate private health insurance” is a bad idea.