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.
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.