It’s astonishing, but sadly not unexpected, the level of red-baiting that arrises whenever the subject of single-payer health care pops up. Also expected is the cynical question: “How are you going to pay for it!?”. Funny, this question is/was NEVER posed when the defense authorization bill comes to a vote, or the bailouts for the banks went through in 2008, or handing out lucrative subsidies to gigantic corporations such as Exxon, Boeing, Raytheon, etc. We could absolutely afford an expanded Medicare-for-All program. The government of the USA is a monetary sovereign. That is to say it issues its own currency which it creates. Tax-payer dollars don’t fund federal programs, and thus it is really disingenuous to propose elaborate tax plans and fear-monger about going broke. The government can literally never run out of dollars. We can run short on resources, doctors, equipment, labor, etc. but not dollars.
The only reason politicians argue in such a fashion against single-payer is because their donors don’t want it.