Really? I was alive in 2020. I can't.

We'll have to go beyond universal healthcare to socialized medicine, ie the UK's National Health System or the VA hospitals.

that’s never going to happen in the US, esp in a post-Trump world where i severely doubt the state capacity to do that will even exist, much less it being worthwhile to pay the upfront costs of it while in the middle of an active health crisis

the american medical system, from doctors to the massive insurance bureaucracy, would never get behind that, and they’re large enough and well-connected enough to utterly kill it dead politically, and there are much more valuable things to use political capital for post-Trump

On the contrary I’d argue it’s inevitable in the US, there is literally no adequate alternative. It’s either universal healthcare or things get exponentially worse forever. I don’t know how long it will take, but voters won’t tolerate that forever.

universal healthcare and the UK socialized system are two very different things, and very few countries have a British-style state-owned system—not to mention that there’s little reason to believe the British healthcare system is a particularly-good model of UHC compared to other countries