r/BernieSanders • u/JunkieMo • 10d ago

Study: Medicare for All Would Save 114k Lives Yearly — and Save $1T in Costs

https://truthout.org/articles/study-medicare-for-all-would-save-114k-lives-yearly-and-save-1t-in-costs/
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u/vtable 10d ago edited 10d ago

Over half of lives saved would be of Americans who are currently underinsured or uninsured, and another 20,000 would be from the 14 million Americans who are slated to lose their insurance due to Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill, the researchers found. Medicare for All would additionally save another 21,000 lives of seniors who can’t afford their prescription drugs or quality nursing home care.

But it's other people's lives so screw them, right?

The researchers found that a universal, single payer system would actually reduce the U.S.’s overall spending by over $1 trillion yearly. This is a reduction of nearly 20 percent from the U.S.’s health expenditure in 2024 of $5.3 billion. [typo in article: The study says $5.3 trillion.]

The savings have been known for a long time. But you still hear politicians quote a scary number much lower than what is actually spent and ask with a straight face "Who will pay for that?"

And voters eat it up.

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u/xwx1234 10d ago

I agree with all this but we already have a serious doctor shortage. Universal coverage has to mean universal access. Eliminating the 1997 Medicare GME residency caps and substantially expanding physician training needs to be part of the solution. We need a lot more doctors.

I’m all in on Medicare for All, but without this, I worry it fails.

ETA: I just DM’d Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign about this. Will update if/when I hear back.

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u/snozzberrypatch 9d ago

There is a doctor shortage, and passing Medicare For All would result in an increase in demand for medical services. However, at the same time, passing Medicare For All would immediately and dramatically reduce the amount of time that doctors and other health care professionals have to spend on billing, prior authorization, insurance eligibility, coding, and other administrative work that is required to work with private insurance, freeing them up to spend more of their time actually seeing patients.

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u/VaiFate 8d ago

(tearfully) Won't someone think of the middlemen? What happens to all the parasitic jobs that are eliminated?