Abstract Objectives: National public healthcare programs have been topics of discussion during presidential elections in the United States of America (US) since 1945. This paper examines the claims and counterclaims of the Medicare for All (MfA) healthcare plan proposed during the 2016 US presidential primaries from a social, health economic perspective. Methods: A narrative literature review was conducted of English-language public domain sources published between January 1, 2015 and January 1, 2017 using PubMed, EMBASE, CINHAL, and Google Scholar utilizing the following search terms: “national”, “health”, “plan”, “universal”, “insurance”, “single”, “payer”, “federal”, “United States”, “Medicare for All”. The “federal” and “plan” search terms were least useful for generating additional, non-redundant content. Results: The two most common issues raised with MfA were economic viability and political possibility; administrative impact: service delivery system, payment policies, benefit design and utilization management issues, was less frequently addressed. The economic critiques of MfA frequently involved federal payers and budget impact perspectives, while the MfA proposal was based upon a broader, social perspective. Administrative impact critiques focused greatly on short-term considerations or potential pit-falls left unaddressed in MfA and identified large information gaps. Conclusions: The recent MfA debate was extremely similar to its predecessors; no overarching consensus was reached, with a clear trend toward negative MfA assessments. The quality of the counterclaims presented was often greatly limited and did not address the ethical issues of the wealthiest country in world history not providing universal, comprehensive healthcare for its citizens when other countries of lesser means can.