The truth is that nobody really knows what percentage of GDP the United States would spend on healthcare if it implemented single payer, because nobody knows what level of spending would be politically acceptable in the United States, because nobody has ever tried to implement single payer before at the federal level. We don’t know what level of spending our healthcare professionals will tolerate, and we don’t know what level of spending (and what level of taxation) our voters will consider acceptable.
Lately there has been some back and forth in the states over the expected cost of single payer healthcare. There is a lot of disagreement over how much single payer will cost because single payer grants the state a monopoly over the healthcare system. This means that the state can dictate how much it is going to pay its doctors, its administrators, its nurses, its drug and equipment manufacturers, and so on. Because the state can dictate the cost of single payer, the true cost of the proposal depends on how much the particular people implementing the proposal intend to spend.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 