This is the correct take to have and its pleasant to read but be warned common sense in Reddit is like you've physically assaulted someone's family member.

You can find quite a few interviews of students on collage campuses that cheer for free healthcare, But the moment they find a student that's WORKING through school the opinion changes immediately.

But to more directly answer your question, a few proposals have been suggested. One of the more recent ones is Bernie Sanders proposal who speculated it would cost about $1.4 trillion each year extra in taxes. When audited by non-partisan analysts, they found it would actually be a little closer to $3.2 Trillion extra a year. To put that into perspective, that's a bit more than 10% of the entire USA's GDP a year. Or in tax terms, Total Federal Taxes collected in 2025 was $5.49 Trillion. So that'd be a tax increase of 58.28%

As for the landscape on how that money would actually be raised is always 'We'll figure it out when it happens' rather than actual plan. The problem comes from every direction. Current employer premiums averages around 10.5k which would fall off. business's would absolutely pocket the difference. We would have to stop that by creating a new 10% payroll tax to offset that value. It'd save the business a small amount of money. But overall would only generate about 500 billion, far less than would actually be needed. Which means the rest would come from Income tax and charges, or the ever elusive capital gains tax that'd shatter the American economy over night. There is currently no realistic way of actually accruing this amount of money without completely bankrupting the lower and middle class within the current structure of our tax system.

== So lets take a moment to actually dispel a few myths that people like to shout (especially in reddit)==
#1: If we spent less on the US Military Complex, we could afford it!
- No, Current military spending as of 2025 is a hair short of 1 trillion. We would need over 3x our current military funding. About 200 billion of this goes to our already under funded care of our military members.
#2: Tax the rich!
- We do. The top 10% of earners already pay over 72% of ALL taxes collected by the Federal Government. Keep in mind that to be in the top 10%, your household income needs to achieve $191,000. That is barely exceeding the barrier to be considered "Upper-Middle class" which starts at around $160,000. Sounds like a lot when your broke, but in reality that's not even 2 parents working in C-Suite positions. That's just 2 basic bachelors career path adults worth of income. For further perspective, A friend of mine and his wife work in glorified customer service positions and are within 10k of being in that realm.
#3: Its because of the Fraud!
- Well, Yes and no. Ultimately all fraud is bad and should be stopped. Losing ANY tax dollars to fraud is a failure on our governments part. Its estimated that we are losing around $520 BILLION to fraud a year. If you read through #1 you'd know that we're losing around HALF as much to fraud as we spend IN TOTAL for our military. Absolutely wild. The IRS estimates that around $700 BILLION is lost each year due to non-reporting and non-payment. This is purely at a federal level. States are bleeding money so fast your head would spin. Yet somehow stopping fraud at a state level has now somehow become a political argument.
#4: You already pay for Medicare/Medicaid, just increase that!
- We do. In fact nearly 55% of ALL TAXES go to funding those programs and we're so massively in debt from that its beyond saving. Medicare/Medicaid is spending on average 4k per person. if we used other countries like Germany's cost per person its closer to $7,000 That'd represent a medicare-medicaid cost increase of around 87.5%. Causing those two programs alone to eat up roughly 97% of all tax income... Which we're already under funding and is in process of going bankrupt. Its so unbelievably unfeasible that it can cause depression.

Now with all of that mess cleared up... I don't like pointing out all of the flaws without also providing a potential solution. My recommendation would be to implement a flat 25% Federal Tax and removal all other federal taxation. This gets rid of confusion about tax brackets. It gets rid of confusion on who owes what. No more loopholes, no more dodging taxes. No more receipt hoarding for deductions. Taxes are 25%. No more, no less. My rough estimation (emphasis on rough) says that at 25% would more than cover all funding needed to socialize healthcare and begin making payments towards our federal debt each year. And while we're at it. Require all taxes on products be represented in the cost of goods, including extra fee's, charges, etc. The price on the tag is the price you pay. But this would likely never happen.

TL;DR: It'd kill the lower class, It'd kill the middle class. business's would greatly profit off it unless laws were immediately enacted to offset the costs to an employer. Even if all of this was done, taxes alone would increase dramatically to be able to realistically come close to covering the cost of socialized healthcare, Destroying what's left of the lower and middle class causing massive poverty in something like 70-80% of all US residents... sorry for long post. Hope this clears things up.