In 2015, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Leon Lederman had to sell off his Nobel Prize to pay his medical bills, following a diagnosis of dementia. His medal ended up selling for $765,000.

In the debate about single-payer healthcare, there is a lot of anxiety around the question of “how do we pay for it?” The emphasis is always on a big, scary number: $650 billion annually, $30 trillion over 10 years, etc. This is a relatively common tactic of private interest groups that oppose new legislation—fear-mongering about costs, and implying such-and-such policy will bankrupt the country.

Actually, it’s been demonstrated a number of times that single-payer healthcare would save money. Taxes would go up, but private healthcare premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay substantially less, it would just be in the form of a tax, instead of a premium.

Instead of viewing healthcare as simply a matter of pricing, we should recognize that we are needlessly losing lives every day by keeping things the way they are.

This is supported by findings from our own government. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office did a study on the potential economic impacts of Medicare For All, and found that we could have universal coverage with no copays or deductibles, and overall healthcare spending would decrease. This is not a new discovery. It’s been understood for decades. As far back as 1991, the Government Accountability Office reported that if we adopted a Canadian-style system, “the savings in administrative costs alone would be more than enough to finance insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured. There would be enough left over to permit a reduction, or possibly even the elimination, of copayments and deductibles.”

We don’t have to look far to see this in action. We can simply look to the rest of the world. In every other developed country on Earth, there is some form of single-payer, and those countries pay substantially less for healthcare. Health spending is the one area where America unquestionably leads the world. We have, by far, the most expensive system on Earth, with about twice the per-capita costs of other industrial nations.

But even the premise of this question about cost employs a one-sided framework. To get a full picture, we need to ask a second question: What........

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