A new study has found that Medicare for All would save over 100,000 lives in the U.S. per year while also reducing Americans’ health care spending by more than $1 trillion annually. Yale University and University of Maryland researchers have estimated that the universal single payer health care system introduced in the Medicare for All Act would prevent 114,000 deaths per year.
This is a capitalist critique of single-payer healthcare and it needs to be pushed back against.
A vital aspect of M4A is going to be breaking the power of all the subsectors of the healthcare industry. Another is going to be reducing curative practices by making more use of preventative practices; people with access to preventative care end up needing a lot less care than people who wait until they are acutely sick and injured.
I would expect that “reducing Americans’ healthcare spending by $1T annually” would be proportionate with how much less would be needed.
If it came down to it, market forces, along with modest incentives/interventions and a phase-in period, would smooth this problem out entirely.
My two cents is the inability of the USA to increase medical services.
It can’t be done with money alone, and even if trillions of dollars were released tomorrow, it would take many years for medical services to catch up. And that would happen only under a socialist or communist government. It cannot happen under capitalism
The USA does not necessarily need to increase its consumption of medical services. For instance, it consumes about a fifth of the world’s pharmaceuticals but does not have proportionately good health outcomes.
Again, we know several of the mechanisms. One is abandoning the extremely poor to use emergency rooms as a main form of healthcare. One is the insurance industry itself that takes a massive cut. One is the legal system that facilitates malpractice lawsuits against providers, encouraging them to take a maximalist (and highest-expense) approach. One is the medical establishment defending the prestige/class position of doctors by maintaining a scarcity of doctors in the economy.
If we can pass M4A, we will also have the ability to do something about all of these factors.
Having a bit of a wait for preventative healthcare is not something that will break people, not on any scale comparable to the tens of millions of DALYs that are lost each year in the USA because of its inferior healthcare system. There are 40+ capitalist countries with some sort of universal health care, and more that have it in development.