Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study

karakoram

>A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

lapcat

This is why it doesn't happen: politicians get bought. "Jeffries co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation between 2013 and 2021, but in August 2026, he stated he shifted his stance and stated that he no longer supports or co-sponsors the proposal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakeem_Jeffries#Healthcare

myfavoritetings

How much would it save if you account for the fact that half of congress would sabotage it in to oblivion?

konaraddi

Link to the preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.26358689...

digitalsurgeonz

Quite weird to see such a study from Yale, Yale is the heart of the capitalistic western empire, and it exists to serve the oligarchy and the capitalists. So then what gives ? perhaps the person working on this report is still an innocent person and has not yet seen the reality of his situation :)

afavour

In a more sane world the Republican Party would be in favor of universal health coverage. How many potential entrepreneurs stay working at BigCorp because they need the health benefits? How many small businesses are crushed by the cost of providing healthcare to their employees? It would be great for business to remove any involvement they have in personal healthcare. But I suppose they are the party of big business, not the party of business in general.

ilamont

There have been studies like this for decades, going back to at least the Clinton administration. And nothing will come of it. Too many entrenched interests, regulatory capture, and lobbying + political donations.

solaarphunk

What about quality of care tradeoffs? In Canada, for example, you are forced to use the government system, and if it doesn't deem you important enough, there is no private option.

jvanderbot

We've been down this road. ACA was predicated on studies like this, to no avail (it turns out that intense opposition chips away at it over time regardless of these studies). I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan. I'm not saying that this is what is happening now , but I am saying that calls for universal health coverage, no matter how correct and well supported, are going to probably face the same obstacles they did last time, so we need new coalitions and implementation proposals if we're going to give it a go again. It has to be different enough that those who would oppose it right after the inevitable pendulum swing do not want to .

ixtli

This doesnt need yet another study. Instead of narrating the problem we should figure out whats actually stopping it. And people saying the ACA was universal health coverage or even an attempt at it should stop intentionally derailing this discussion.

RajuChacha108

Government provided healthcare ? NO.

whimsicalism

I'm honestly curious how we square this with the only experimental evidence we have on cost-sharing in the US, like the Oregon Medicaid Study and the RAND study which showed no impact on mortality or really any physical health outcomes at all.

aidenn0

I've become so cynical that I think even if universal health coverage would be passed, since it almost certainly would be run by the executive branch, it would become just another political football to be fucked with every 4 to 8 years. Just think, if we had universal health care in the US today, the MMR vaccine would not be covered by it!

greenpizza13

The US is far too broken for such a thing to ever come to be. Politicians are bought and paid for, and the impact on the insurance companies and their profits make this impossible. US legislators will never, ever, ever put the needs of the people above the needs of corporations, not as long as corporations can wield their massive wealth as "free speech" in the form of lobbying and political donations. Sounds nice, though.

b3ing

Won’t happen the big players make too much money the way things are, and that is more important than people’s lives or for our country

loeg

What UHC proponents never honestly admit is that these headline figures require incredibly optimistic assumptions and also much more rationing of care than our current model. We spend a lot on healthcare because we consume a lot of services. To save money, you have to buy fewer services. Yes, you can squeeze providers a little bit ("Medicare-level payments to providers" -- which they will absolutely hate, by the way), and you get another little bit by disposing of insurance provider profit margins ("reduced administrative overhead"). But the vast majority is coming from rationing, which people hate . And it would also cost massively increased taxes on the middle class, which voters also hate. "Fewer avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations" -- sheer optimism. "Less fraudulent billing" -- no reason to believe this would be true. There could be even more fraudulent billing! Medicare fraud has been a big problem, and solutions are largely reactionary.

ConceptJunkie

Since when has a government projection of costs ever been in any way realistic? The estimates for the costs of Medicare when it was established were low by a factor of 10.

jayess

Who's gonna tell the doctors and nurses that they get a 50% pay cut?

dotcoma

Yeah, but how much would it cost in profits? That's the only thing that matters in Amerika.