The USA is effectively 50 countries with different demographics, geography, culture, and needs. Trying to impose any “one size fits all” solution won’t work because it’s not appropriate for a significant number of them.
For example, the CA legislature was thinking about a single-payer healthcare bill for CA. Unfortunately, they can't do it on their own: they need special dispensation from the US Congress (and possibly the executive branch? I don't recall the details exactly) to use Medicare dollars in a way contrary to federal rules. That's unlikely to happen in the current political climate.
A cause of this deadlock is that federal taxes aren't optional. Even if CA wants to handle something for itself, it can't just tell all CA residents to stop paying that particular tax to the federal government. The state does get federal money, but it comes with strings attached. Yes, CA's taxes are already some of the highest in the nation, but I'd be fine with a (big) CA tax hike for statewide universal health care if it also meant that my federal taxes would be lower (and CA would be responsible for raising more of its budget on its own, being cut off from federal healthcare-related money). But that's just not how things work.
(Overall, I think this is a good thing: me paying into the nationwide Medicare pool means that states that would otherwise be going through budget shortfalls don't suffer. But it's ridiculous that the federal government is telling my state government what it can and can't do with what's effectively its own money, while I'm subsidizing healthcare for people in other states.)
As sort of a meta-point, the USA is maybe more like 10 or 15 different countries. Sure, there's a lot of difference in needs, values, and attitudes between someone living in Wyoming vs. Baltimore, but the people who live in DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Chicago have a lot in common. As do people living in Wyoming and Montana. They're not the same, but they likely have enough in common for single solutions to many problems to apply equally, or equally enough. I'm encouraged by states in the same geographic area coordinating their COVID-19 response; it shows that states with similar needs can (and should!) band together to tackle common issues where the solutions are likely to be similar.
In the absence of that missing supply side conversation, the proposals do start to resemble as forms of socialism i.e a simple redistribution and reversal to the mean with no major improvement to the overall system. Add assumed inefficiencies with government run systems, and you now have a more evenly distributed system but one that’s fundamentally worse in aggregate than the one before i.e. quite literally socialism of the 20th century that’s been tried and failed over and over again.
That part of it is actually not complicated: once you dismantle the private health insurance industry, you eliminate billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency that can now go toward actual care. Not saying that there won't be inefficiencies in a government-administrated system, but we actually already know what that looks like (Medicare).
Increasing the number of doctors is another issue, as private industry trade groups effectively set a cap on the number of doctors by limiting the number of teaching hospitals and medical school programs, and how many students they're allowed to take. (It's basically a doctor salary protection racket; limit the supply of doctors and the existing ones will make more money.)
We don't want "Medicare for all". Really.
If that's "socialism", then I'm all for it. The idea that we shouldn't ensure that everyone has access to clean water in this age is ludicrous, and, frankly, reprehensible.
Classic American culture is rooted in independence. I honestly don’t grasp the notion that “access to clean water” involves compelling others to make water clean & available cheap/free in large quantity; don’t ruin what water is commonly available, property rights apply, collect what flows/falls on your property ... otherwise it’s up to you to buy or acquire/purify for your own needs.
If an area does not have a suitable source, move. There is no right to live where you like and compel others to alleviate regional inadequacies.
“Access to clean water” is not appropriate where there isn’t any (which includes much of the US), or where water has been ruined beyond reasonable reclamation (Flint, Syracuse, etc).
"50 countries with different demographics geography culture and needs!" is a complete fabrication. Wyoming doesn't even have a million people in it; implying Wyoming is a country is like implying a go-kart is a jet.
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Even at the city level, I think its is too broad of a generalization. Berkeley and Baltimore have roughly the same population density but very distinct cultures
The Vatican is not in fact a country, but a city state (or a sovereign microstate) and it is an exception, not the norm.
It is anyway an independent state with sovereignty, it signs treatise with other states (like the Lateran treaty that binds it to Italy) has its own official language (Latin) its own calling code (+379) its own ISO 3166 code (VA) and its own Internet TLD (.va) so it more or less works as any other independent country out there.
And even though the actual resident population is very small, they have properties all over the World, they are in fact one of the most powerful countries in the World serving over 1.2 billions catholics (it's even 18th in the World for GDP per capita, even though the Vatican wealth is not really expressed by the GDP).
If you look at it that way, Vatican State is more of a country than Kansas will ever be.
Lichtenstein has 38 thousands citizens
There are 164 countries in the World with less than one million citizens and 159 with one million or more
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populat...
This is yet another annoying expression of American exceptionalism. Of course, it only ever comes up when someone says, "Maybe we should stop people dying because they can't afford healthcare."
The US is probably one of the most culturally uniform countries of any significant size I can think of honestly.