Letter to the editor: Cover everyone and save money

I submitted the following letter to the editor of my local paper in response to a column they published about health care. It was printed in the April 27 edition with minor edits. Here is the original.

John Torinus’s column “Will latest hospital merger help consumers?” in the April 20 News Graphic laments the rising costs in health care and the arms race between providers and insurance companies. But he does not address the clear solution for a country that spends twice as much as other high-income nations for worse care: single-payer healthcare, also known as Medicare for All.

Health care costs are 16.8% of GDP and rising in America, compared to an average of 10.5% in high-income countries with single-payer systems. How has every other nation figured out a solution to rising health care costs while America has not? Simple: the “Medical Industrial Complex” actively seeks to undermine any attempt at a more efficient, cheaper, equitable, and quality system in this country.

Our byzantine system of private insurance, health care providers, and profit-maximizing pharmaceutical companies produces so much administrative overhead. Health care administration—not the care itself—costs $2,497 per person in the U.S. each year. In Canada it’s $551. That’s 34% of America’s total expenditures on health partly going to massive pay packages for hospital executives, as Torinus points out. But he neglects to mention all the money flowing to private insurance, where most companies are for-profit (while most hospital systems are non-profit).

This is all in a country where 27.5 million Americans (10.2%) still have no health insurance, compared to 0% in nations with a universal single-payer system, like Canada and the U.K. An analysis of 22 single-payer proposals in the U.S. found an average net savings of 3.5% in the first year alone, and continued savings as the years go on. The economic case for Medicare for All is obvious: we can cover everyone and save money.