Has the tide of health care justice turned — in the wrong direction? Last month, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin announced that he could no longer “responsibly support” a funding plan for his long-awaited “single-payer” plan for the state. It wasn’t long before some on the Right claimed a historic victory.

“As crises of faith go,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board gloated, “this is Mikhail Gorbachev circa 1991 territory.” After all, single-payer health care, according to the Journal, is not merely “the polite term for socialized medicine,” but nothing less than “the ultimate goal of the political left.”

Now, inapt historical analogies aside, it is fair to concede the Journal’s point that universal health care has long been on the left and progressive agenda, from the “[f]ree medical care, including midwifery and medicines” called for by the 1891 Erfurt Program onward.