Interesting, tried Vermont but couldn’t find it (a 2015 single-payer effort, but not that), will look more later, I’d love to see what a state-level law at governments taking over hospitals and such even looks like, gotta be some weird reading and I have no idea how you’d write that such that it’d have a prayer of surviving court challenge—seize poor people’s houses to give to companies (or, on behalf of a company that then backs out, and all you got was wrecking some of your own citizens’ houses, lol) you’re all good according to the courts, but do basically the reverse? No way that’d fly. Those proposals have to be crazy reads.
I’d maybe vote against state level single payer, let alone taking over healthcare entirely, because I think it’d be a ton less efficient than doing it at the federal level—enormous amounts of money already go to various federal healthcare programs and it’d be better to pool that, and also lack of state level control over their markets is likely to cause problems. I dunno, it might depend on the law, but my gut reaction is a “no” vote on that, too.
Anyway, as for the other question, I believe that the rise of the postwar think-tank industry (a mash up of k-street and Madison Avenue, but for white papers, as it quickly became) and deliberate party and industry efforts to shift public sentiment in pro-market directions, tied up with lots of government spending on anti-Soviet messaging (were they bad? Oh, yeah. Were all the things the government tried to lump in with them and decry as un-American bad? Ehhhh… I mean atheism is among those, see the change to the pledge and to our money at the time, among other things, and I think atheism’s fine) is probably why healthcare can be this incredibly messed-up and nationalization remains not just not-popular-enough-to-pass, but entirely outside the Overton window, yes.
Vermont actually passed a single-payer resolution, which would have been the signature achievement of Peter Shumlin, the governor at the time. But actually executing on the resolution required a budget and tax plan to fund it, and the whole thing fell apart.
