Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".
Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.
Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.
If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.
That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.
To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.
Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job. Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely ignored.
There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.
This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.
That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose nationalized medicine.
Successful social programs help everyone, and let the poor benefit implicitly more. All old people benefit from the existence of Medicare for example, even if they are personally wealthy enough to afford alternatives, so Medicare is relatively simple to access and almost universally loved. No one is going to win elections campaigning on slashing medicare, and no one is in danger of losing their Medicare status if they fill out a form wrong.