>Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5%.

I don't see you complaining that the US military has a low operating margin, so maybe we can just agree that some things are just normal expenses for a population. Which therefore leads to step 2: nationalize every single hospital.

>cutting salaries for doctors/nurses/etc

Considering that over 50% of the money that goes into healthcare is just siphoned off by middlemen, no, just getting rid of these means that your health workers do not have a worse salary.

>But, we're actually in a primary care shortage.

Because people do not even go see their GP since there's a chance it leads to life ruining expenses.

> fewer residents are going into family medicine.

Because they're going where money is. Remove that from the equation, and all you have is a public service with public servants.

>a lot of people in the industry believe that Medicare has a large amount of undetected fraud.

Aside from the fact that "people in the industry" have a financial interest in making you believe Medicare is a net negative, there's a great thing that comes from making healthcare a public service: there's no longer any fraud. And those "fraudulent" expenses you used to have that were costing you millions anyways have just had their costs cut in half.

>Healthcare reform is hard.

It's the easiest thing in the world when you have the amount of money the US does. Healthcare reform isn't a financial or infrastructure problem, it's a political one. Cuba has a working healthcare system despite being under US embargo. Botswana has a working healthcare system. Rwanda has a working healthcare system. Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Serbia, and the list goes on.

Once you grow the balls to nationalize everything, even a first year economy student could make a plan that works.

Every country with nationalized healthcare systems has lower wages for clinicians. So the notion that this wouldn't lower salaries is just ludicrous. That might be an acceptable trade-off but let's not pretend it doesn't exist.

In practice what we would see under a single-payer system is that many doctors would opt out and shift to a cash payment model. So the shortage of doctors would get even worse for patients who can't afford to pay out of pocket.