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SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE WOULD SAVE MONEY AND LIVES  
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Jackson Diianni
March 26, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ Our current way of doing things is inhumane and unsustainable, and
it is essential that we transition to a system which prioritizes
patient care over profit. _

Protesters supporting Medicare for All hold a rally outside PhRMA
headquarters April 29, 2019 in Washington, D.C., Win McNamee/Getty
Images)

 

In 2015, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Leon Lederman
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had to sell off his Nobel Prize to pay his medical bills, following a
diagnosis of dementia. His medal ended up selling for $765,000.

In the debate about single-payer healthcare, there is a lot of anxiety
around the question of “how do we pay for it?” The emphasis is
always on a big, scary number: $650 billion annually, $30 trillion
over 10 years, etc. This is a relatively common tactic of private
interest groups that oppose new legislation—fear-mongering about
costs, and implying such-and-such policy will bankrupt the country.

Actually, it’s been demonstrated a number of times that single-payer
healthcare would save money. Taxes would go up, but private healthcare
premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay
substantially less, it would just be in the form of a tax, instead of
a premium.

Instead of viewing healthcare as simply a matter of pricing, we should
recognize that we are needlessly losing lives every day by keeping
things the way they are.

This is supported by findings from our own government. In 2021, the
Congressional Budget Office did a study
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impacts of Medicare For All, and found that we could have universal
coverage with no copays or deductibles, and overall healthcare
spending would decrease. This is not a new discovery. It’s been
understood for decades. As far back as 1991, the Government
Accountability Office reported [[link removed]]
that if we adopted a Canadian-style system, “the savings in
administrative costs alone would be more than enough to finance
insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who are currently
uninsured. There would be enough left over to permit a reduction, or
possibly even the elimination, of copayments and deductibles.”

We don’t have to look far to see this in action. We can simply look
to the rest of the world. In every other developed country on Earth,
there is some form of single-payer, and those countries pay
substantially less for healthcare. Health spending is the one area
where America unquestionably leads the world. We have, by far, the
most expensive system on Earth, with about twice
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the per-capita costs of other industrial nations.

But even the premise of this question about cost employs a one-sided
framework. To get a full picture, we need to ask a second question:
What does it cost not to have single-payer?

According to a 2020 study
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by Yale epidemiologists for _The Lancet_, around 68,000 people a year
die in America because they don’t have access to healthcare. Simply
put, we let large numbers of people die from illnesses that could be
treated. No other rich country tolerates that kind of inequality.
It’s basically unheard-of in places like the U.K. and Canada. In
2022, the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ (PNAS)
released a study
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estimating that the U.S. could have seen around 338,000 fewer deaths
from Covid-19 if we’d had single-payer.

A second consideration that’s not included is medical bankruptcies.
A 2009 study
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American Journal of Medicine_ found that 62% of bankruptcies in the
U.S. are medical bankruptcies (roughly 500,000 annually). In 1981,
that number was 8%. Healthcare costs have risen to the point that many
Americans simply can’t afford health insurance, and many who can are
underinsured. So people can have their savings wiped out because of a
medical emergency, or a healthcare crisis in their family, without
warning.

You almost never hear these factors (deaths from treatable diseases,
medical bankruptcies) brought up in media discussions about healthcare
reform. They’re effectively censored out of public debate. In
reporting about Medicare For All, chances are you’ll only hear the
price tag. As a consequence, we think of healthcare exclusively in
terms of financial costs. This framework, which is used by most major
outlets, encourages us to think of the status quo as, essentially,
cost-free, and hides these external considerations in places that are
easy to ignore. Instead of viewing healthcare as simply a matter of
pricing, we should recognize that we are needlessly losing lives every
day by keeping things the way they are. This gives us a more accurate
picture.

There’s a way out of this. Healthcare could be established as a
basic human right, the way it is in every other developed country, by
replacing our for-profit system with a single-payer system, which
would both dramatically reduce costs and save tens of thousands of
lives per year. Our current way of doing things is inhumane and
unsustainable, and it is essential that we transition to a system
which prioritizes patient care over profit. The cost of not doing this
is other people’s pain and lives.

* Healthcare as a Right; Single Payer Health Care;
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