Rosa DeLauro has been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1991, which means she was there when Democrats tried to pass comprehensive health care legislation first unsuccessfully, when Bill Clinton was president, and then successfully, when it was Barack Obama s turn. She took many lessons from those episodes, but one of the biggest was that threatening the insurance of people with good employer benefits is a terrible idea, no matter how appealing the new alternative sounds.

There are 160 million people who get their insurance through their employer, DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, told HuffPost recently. You cannot tell them overnight that it is gone.

Lots of Democrats are making similar argument these days as proposals to create a single-payer Medicare for all system get serious attention and scrutiny . The proposal getting the most attention right now comes from Bernie Sanders , the independent Vermont senator who made Medicare for all a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign. House Democrats are working on a version of their own. Progressive supporters say the approach offers the most efficient way to make sure everybody can get affordable medical care plus, they note, it would mean ending private insurance hassles once and for all.

But enrolling everybody into a government-run insurance plan would also mean wiping away employer-sponsored coverage, and the available polling , consistent with DeLauros viewpoint, suggests the public would be wary. That is one reason even some Democrats who endorsed Medicare for all in the past are balking at committing to it now, while others are pushing explicitly to start much more slowly perhaps by taking one of the two big existing programs, Medicare or Medicaid, and opening them up to carefully targeted groups of people. An example is a new bill from several Democratic senators that would let people older than 50 buy into Medicare.

DeLauro, whose district includes some of the most liberal-leaning parts of New Haven, has bigger plans in mind. Along with another House Democrat, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, DeLauro has put together a proposal that envisions more dramatic reforms than those limited Medicare or Medicaid expansion proposals would launch, even though it would stop short of the kind of immediate, wholesale transformation that Medicare for all would unleash.