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.
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That saving 1T in costs would be 1T not being sent to the pockets of oligarchs so this won’t happen.
yeah, this fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of healthcare in the US. the point is to extract money, any health or care that happens is incidental.
Yeah, but have you thought about the poor insurance bureaucrats? What about their jobs?
“we have to unionize and regulate the insurance companies so that americans can finally pay a flat, market rate for their healthcare”
US would rather Balkanize
Nah, let’s keep giving weapons to Israel!
this would let us send more weapons to Israel!
edit: and I guess some people, too
edit2: I assumed it was obvious I am not endorsing this, but I guess you never know
If you’ve got a fence sitting liberal in your life show them this study and explain to them the Marxist analysis that this money and these deaths are the cost of doing things the capitalist way
Try and reframe it in their minds. It is not that universal healthcare would save money and lives (a hypothetical): capitalism is killing people and charging us for it!
Yes, but at what cost?
Apparently about a trillion dollars
Yeah at this rate I think the US would rather collapse than have free healthcare
Under capitalism what is good and makes sense to the workers is bad and makes no sense to the capitalists. Our interests are fundamentally opposed. I’m all for electoral campaigns as a tactic, since it builds engagement and develops consciousness. But the strategy is to build for power, which means a mass movement and a worker’s party.
Americans still trapped in 2016
One issue about Medicare for all, that I do not see talked about very much, is that many places have their medical clinics and doctors used to capacity now. They cannot handle a threefold increase of patients
Free medical care, if it ever exists, will not mean timely assistance for most communities. The health resources need to be expanded. Like most infrastructure in the USA, this has multiple barriers against improvement
Maybe some of that trillion in savings could be put towards constructing medical facilities and training healthcare professionals?
More medical professionals would be needed to work. And more suppliers would be required. Either would need a cultural revolution and years to change, even with the money flowing.
It’s similar to throwing money at industries that were outsourced. It’s not possible because of a lack of prerequisites that cannot be willed into existence without years or decades of effort. Shipbuilding comes to mind.
The fact that nobody is seriously trying to do the prep work for such a monumental work in medical shows two things: nobody seriously expects Medicare for all; and the USA is fundamentally incapable of change.
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.
reducing Americans’ health care spending by more than $1 trillion annually
that doesnt sound very good for the insurance companies.
