No way the Federal Government could stand up a single=payer system. Can you imagine the chaos if they tried to extend Medicare to everyone? NHS was erected with some difficulty after WWII because no country in Europe was so used to regimentation as Britain was in 1946 and so beaten down. A teacher for the DoD overseas schools I knew was in both Germany and England around 1950 and said she could hardly tell which country had suffered more, the “victor” or the “loser,”
The UK had the enormous burden of simultaneously maintaining the forces necessary to maintain its empire and fight insurgencies (in some cases Communist) that cropped up as local elites in its African and Asian colonies rose up in order to get a bigger share of the spoils available to political decision makers. Germany did not. The UK repaid the Lend Lease loans. Germany not only had no war loans to pay back - it kept a fair chunk of what was confiscated from the conquered nations it occupied, without having to pay reparations. Ultimately, the UK recovered by ditching its imperial possessions, which were mostly a breakeven economic proposition, and its economic output per capita and standard of living skyrocketed as a result of a drastic reduction in defense-related taxation and expenditures.