Excerpt:

In the United States, death rates from COVID-19 are higher than in any other high-income country—and our fragmented and inefficient health system may be largely to blame, Yale researchers say in a new study.

If the U.S. had had a single-payer universal health care system in 2020, nearly 212,000 American lives would have been saved that year, according to a new study. In addition, the country would have saved $105 billion in COVID-19 hospitalization expenses alone.

The research team further calculated that in a non-pandemic year, some $438 billion would be saved by single-payer universal health care, like Medicare for All.

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The researchers compared people with and without health insurance, examining death rates from COVID-19 and overall. Building on earlier research, they calculated that 131,438 COVID deaths in 2020 could have been avoided with universal single-payer health care.

Overall, including both COVID and non-COVID patients, 211,897 lives would have been saved in 2020 with universal care. From the start of the pandemic in the U.S. to March 2022, those preventable deaths mount to 338,594.

Far from financially burdening the nation, universal single-payer health care would not only have saved lives, it would have also avoided hundreds of billions of dollars in costs. Medicare for All would reduce costs by improving access to preventive care, reducing administrative overhead, and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices, the researchers said. Single-payer health care would also eliminate pricy insurance premiums and reduce fraud.

“A single-payer health care system would be much more economically efficient than our current fragmented structure and would save over $450 billion per year,” Galvani said.