Save Lives and Save Money

Why does Senator Bernie Sanders have a great chance to be elected President? A study published in The Lancet finds that Medicare for All would be a hugely successful policy.

[W]e calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). 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. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives.

Update (January 9, 2021):  A paper published in Health Affairs finds that single-payer health insurance is even more feasible than we thought.

What the researchers find is that most estimates of the effect of universal coverage expansion on healthcare utilization are overblown, adding to a growing consensus that Medicare for All is less costly than previously thought due to lower administrative costs and usage rates that increase only slightly or not at all.

[T]he Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that implementing a single-payer health insurance program in the U.S. would reduce overall healthcare spending nationwide by about $650 billion per year.

Between the CBO's finding that Medicare for All's administrative cost savings have been underestimated and Gaffney et al.'s finding that the effects of universal coverage reforms on healthcare utilization and costs have been overestimated, it is becoming increasingly clear that in addition to saving lives, Medicare for All would be less expensive than previously acknowledged.

Update (June 19, 2022):  A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA finds that single-payer health insurance would have saved lives and money over the first two years of the pandemic.

[F]rom the pandemic’s beginning until mid-March 2022, universal health care could have saved more than 338,000 lives from COVID-19 alone. The U.S. also could have saved $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease—on top of the estimated $438 billion that could be saved in a nonpandemic year.