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Yale study: Medicare for All would save over 114,000 lives and $1 trillion a year

scienceAug 11, 202643158

A new Yale analysis, posted as a preprint on medRxiv and highlighted Aug. 11 by Sen. Bernie Sanders, finds that replacing the U.S. health system with Medicare for All would reduce national health expenditure by $1,041 billion annually and save more than 114,000 lives each year. The authors update prior work that estimated roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion in annual savings and say the larger figures reflect recent data and policy changes. The study breaks the $1,041 billion estimate into specific savings: $377.5 billion from paying no more than other major countries for prescription drugs, $286.3 billion from eliminating bureaucracy and waste, $285.7 billion from curbing fraudulent billing, $100 billion from avoiding costly emergency and hospital visits, and $295.6 billion from reimbursing providers fairly. Yale’s team also warns that Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the failure to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies could leave upward of 15 million Americans uninsured over the next decade, a trend universal coverage would reverse. Sanders said the findings show Medicare for All would “save lives and save money” and argued the single-payer proposal would cost about $1 trillion less than the current system. Because the paper is a medRxiv preprint, its methods and conclusions have not yet been peer reviewed.

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