It was reported in The Nation (and nowhere else that I ever found when I went looking—so, grain of salt) that Obama said that all the totally unnecessary jobs that’d be eliminated are exactly why he wouldn’t push full single payer.

It’s a regressive-tax-funded white collar makework jobs program. JFC.

He didn't have the votes to get single payer through Congress. Simple as.

Yes, I agree that is at least one reason that happened, and possibly the main one.

I think the Nation’s quote of him on the topic points out something that may be true, which is that he might have balked at doing it given how many people would be laid off (hundreds of thousands, surely) and what the optics of that would be, though I kinda doubt the quote itself.

But yeah, even if he’d been gung-ho behind it, it wasn’t happening.

Yeah, this really makes me think that America's soaring GDP is really just BS numbers, because a lot of the "productivity" that it reflects is just BS jobs that add negative value to society. I'm wondering if, at some point, there's going to be a big correction as the rest of the world realizes that it makes no sense to value the USD as highly as it is, since much of that "value" is in stuff like Americans selling each other overpriced houses (due to artificially constricted supply) and overpriced healthcare.