Study Claims Medicare for All Could Save Thousands of Lives

America spends more on health care than any other country, yet millions of people remain uninsured or unable to afford the care their insurance supposedly provides. A new analysis now claims a single-payer system could save more than $1 trillion annually and prevent over 114,000 deaths each year.

Those numbers have quickly entered the political debate around Medicare for All. But while the study’s overall direction is supported by many previous economic models, critics argue that some of its biggest assumptions may be far too optimistic.

A New Analysis Puts The Savings Above $1 Trillion

The latest estimate comes from Alison Galvani, a Yale epidemiologist, and her research team. Their updated analysis was posted as a preprint in July 2026, meaning it had not yet been through peer review.

The researchers modeled a health care system resembling the Medicare for All Act, where a single public insurer would replace the current patchwork of private and public coverage.

Their calculations suggest that annual health spending could fall from roughly $5.2 trillion to about $4.2 trillion.

That would represent savings of around $1.041 trillion each year. Senator Bernie Sanders quickly cited the findings in support of Medicare for All, while economists and analysts began examining the assumptions behind the headline figure.

Five Major Changes Drive The Projected Savings

Most of the estimated trillion-dollar reduction comes from a small number of major changes. The figures are substantial, but each depends on assumptions about how providers, patients, insurers, and drug companies would respond to a new system.

The model identifies five major sources of savings:

• Lower prescription drug costs: A single national buyer could negotiate prices more aggressively, producing an estimated $377.5 billion in savings.
• Medicare-level provider payments: Paying hospitals and physicians at Medicare rates could save around $295.6 billion.
• Simplified administration: Replacing multiple insurers with one system could reduce administrative costs by $286.3 billion.
• Reduced fraudulent billing: The model assigns $285.7 billion in savings to preventing fraudulent claims.
• Fewer emergency visits: Better access to routine care could save another $100 billion, according to the analysis.

The researchers also added roughly $304 billion in new spending. That includes increased medical use by people who are currently uninsured or underinsured, universal dental coverage, and payment for treatment hospitals already provide without reimbursement.

The Study Estimates More Than 114,000 Deaths Could Be Prevented

The mortality figure is even more dramatic than the financial estimate. According to the model, universal coverage could prevent approximately 114,174 deaths every year.

That number combines two separate estimates. About 62,863 deaths are linked to providing adequate coverage to people who are currently uninsured or underinsured, while another 51,311 are connected to projected coverage losses.

The figure should not be treated as a literal annual headcount. It is a model-based estimate built from earlier research examining how insurance coverage affects access to care and mortality.

The Yale announcement also noted an important limitation. The researchers counted excess deaths associated with underinsurance only among adults aged 19 to 64, which they said could make their estimate conservative in one respect.

Critics Say The Biggest Numbers Depend On Optimistic Assumptions

Health economists raised similar concerns when Galvani’s team published an earlier Medicare for All analysis in 2020. Many of those objections have returned with the updated model.

Gerard Anderson, a health economist at Johns Hopkins, told KFF Health News that “The assumptions are unrealistic.” He questioned whether providers could realistically lose as much revenue as the model assumes while the system continued functioning as intended.

The $285.7 billion assigned to reducing fraudulent billing has also attracted criticism. Independent analyst Alexander Muse argued that the evidence used to support the estimate, including data related to Taiwan’s move toward single-payer health care, does not clearly justify such a large projected reduction.

The dispute matters because the fraud estimate represents more than one-quarter of the study’s headline savings. If several of the model’s most contested assumptions fail, the final number could fall dramatically.

Most Major Models Still Predict Savings

Criticism of one study does not erase the broader research on single-payer financing. A 2020 systematic review examined 22 economic models produced by government agencies, consultants, and academic researchers.

Nineteen of those 22 analyses projected net savings during the first year. The estimated savings ranged from 3% to 27%, showing major disagreement over the size of the potential benefit.

The common explanations included lower administrative costs, stronger bargaining power over drug prices, and changes to provider payments. Even so, the review also found less optimistic scenarios, including one model projecting that a single-payer system could increase costs by around 7%.

That range reveals the real disagreement. The debate is less about whether America’s health care system contains major inefficiencies and more about how much money a different financing system could realistically save.

Paying for First Class, Flying Standby 

The debate over Medicare for All often gets lost in a blizzard of economic projections and trillion-dollar models. But step away from the spreadsheets, and the reality is much simpler: Americans are paying luxury prices for a system that regularly fails to deliver basic care.

Whether a single-payer system ultimately saves $1 trillion or “only” $500 billion almost misses the point. As the study’s authors noted, the obstacle has never been a lack of money, but how we choose to spend it. As economists continue to debate the exact math, millions of families are left navigating a system where merely having insurance doesn’t mean you can actually afford to get sick. The defining question is no longer whether we can afford to change the system, but how much longer we can afford to keep it exactly as it is.

Source:

1. Pandey, A., Wells, C. R., Ye, Y., Fitzpatrick, M., & Galvani, A. P. (2026). Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.22.26358689