An analysis of peer-reviewed scientific papers found overwhelming consensus in the conclusion that Medicare for All would indeed save the American taxpayer money.
91 percent of all peer-reviewed scientific articles find that a single payer healthcare system like Medicare for All would save the country money, according to a meta analysis released Wednesday.
The study, published in the influential open access journal PLOS Medicine, is a systematic review of 22 single payer plans from 18 studies, published between 1991 and 2018, including 8 national cases and 14 state-level plans. It found that 20 analyses (91 percent) predicted savings over a few years, and 19 (86 percent) projected there to be immediate overall savings in year one.
The team, headed by lead author Christopher Cai of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, concluded that: “In this systematic review, we found a high degree of analytic consensus for the fiscal feasibility of a single-payer approach in the US.”
The authors found that studies funded by organizations across the political spectrum agreed that there were huge savings to be made by switching to a single payer system; with a median estimate of a 3.5 percent reduction in total costs in the first year alone. One area where the studies predicted gigantic savings was in healthcare administration, with estimates varying from 1.2 to 16.4 percent of total costs (with a median of 8.8 percent). Many studies also highlighted a reduction in fraud and waste that could amount to as much as five percent of all healthcare costs being eliminated.
However, the areas where most progress could be made were in a simplified billing system and lower drug prices due to collective bargaining. The U.S. government is unique in blocking itself from negotiating drug prices, largely on account of the power of the pharmaceutical lobby. As a result, drugs such as insulin have tripled in price in the last decade, to the point where American-made insulin is over ten times as expensive in the U.S. as it is in Canada.
Another example of American price inflation is the HIV medication Truvada. The U.S. public footed the bill for the research and development of the drug, but the patent is owned by Gilead Sciences, who charge Americans around $1,700 a month for it, a gross profit of $28,000. In Australia, where the government negotiates the price, the same medication is sold for $8 per month. The drug effectively stops the transmission of HIV, but, because of the prohibitive cost, fewer than ten percent of the Americans who should be taking it currently are. The U.S. already buys Truvada from Gilead for around $6 per month and gives it to people in Sub-Saharan Africa. But it is banned by its own laws from doing the same for its own citizens. Last month MintPress reported that Gilead is accused of holding back the development of Truvada in order to maximize profits, causing an estimated 16,000 deaths.
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#MedicareForAll is the best solution.
