MEDICARE FOR ALL WOULD SAVE $450 BILLION ANNUALLY WHILE PREVENTING 68,000 DEATHS, NEW STUDY SHOWS

Let’s refuse to buy the lie that it’s just impossible for our country to join the rest of the developed world and ensure healthcare as a human right. Let’s refuse to be complicit with a system of profit and greed that kills and bankrupts thousands of human beings every year while remaining vastly more costly than any other system on Earth. This is madness! This is cruel and immoral and obscene! Let’s unite in standing up for justice and caring and compassion for our sisters and brothers rather than enabling the merchants of death! — Molly

 
BY JASON LEMON

The Medicare For All plan proposed by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year and would prevent tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, a new study shows.

The analysis, conducted by researchers at Yale University, the University of Florida and the University of Maryland, found that transitioning the U.S. to a single-payer health care system would actually save an estimated $450 billion each year, with the average American family seeing about $2,400 in annual savings. The research, which was published Saturday in the medical journal The Lancet, also found that Medicare for all would prevent about 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year.

"Our study is actually conservative because it doesn't factor in the lives saved among underinsured Americans—which includes anyone who nominally has insurance but has postponed or foregone care because they couldn't afford the copays and deductibles," Alison Galvani, an author of the study and researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health, told Newsweek.

Overall, the new research anticipates annual savings of about 13 percent in national health care costs, while providing better health care access to lower-income families. According to the study, about 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, while an additional 41 million people do not have adequate health care coverage. Taken together, about 24 percent of the total population does not have health care coverage that meets their needs.

"The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations," the authors wrote in the study.

The authors also noted, as Sanders often does when discussing Medicare for all, that health care expenditures in the U.S. are "higher" per capita "than in any other country."

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