I make a living teaching students how to construct arguments and analyze arguments made by others. I wrote a book about logic. I love this stuff. So when I see a New York Times opinion piece titled “This Is the Strongest Argument Against Medicare for All,” my ears perk up.

The author, Reason magazine features editor Peter Suderman, tells the story of Vermont’s brief flirtation with the possibility of passing a state-level program similar in certain respects to Bernie Sanders’s federal Medicare for All proposal. According to Suderman, the effort failed, and this “failure” shows “why any similar project undertaken at a national scale is unlikely to succeed as well.”

There are two central problems with the claim that Vermont “tried” and “failed” to implement a “single-payer” health insurance plan. The first is that the proposal being considered in Vermont wasn’t a single-payer plan. The second is that it was never tried.