Single-Payer Health Care: $570 Billion Cheaper

Economist Gerald Friedman has what looks to be the silver bullet against the claim that single-payer health care is infeasible on economic grounds, showing how “Medicare for all” could save billions of dollars while improving millions of lives.

Study his easy-to-grasp charts and figures explaining how to fund the plan and how much it would save in the two-page document linked below. —ARK

Gerald Friedman at Dollars & Sense:

The Expanded & Improved Medicare for all act” (HR 676) would establish a single authority responsible for paying for health care for all Americans. Providing universal coverage with a “single-payer” system would change many aspects of American health care. While it would raise some costs by providing access to care for those currently uninsured or under-insured, it would save much larger sums by eliminating insurance middlemen and radically simplifying payment to doctors and hospitals. While providing superior health care, a single-payer system would save as much as $570 billion now wasted on administrative overhead and monopoly profits. A single-payer system would also make health-care financing dramatically more progressive by replacing fixed, income-invariant health-care expenditures with progressive taxes. This series of charts and graphs shows why we need a single-payer system and how it could be funded.

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david drexler (CC-BY)