How much will your taxes need to rise to pay for Medicare-for-all? Zero!
In fact, the savings from Medicare-for-all (M4A) are huge. If we would have started Medicare-for-all (M4A) in 2017, then the government would have saved nearly $6 trillion on its health care costs over 10 years, and the nation would have saved nearly $22 trillion on health-care costs during the same time period.
There are two main data items for this. One is Kevin Thorpe’s estimate of the health-care costs, and the other, a 2016 peer-reviewed study by David U. Himmelstein, MD, and Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, that found that the government funds about 65 percent of total health care costs. Thorpe is the Chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management at Emory University. Himmelstein and Woolhandler are researchers who study health-care economics and other health related issues.
Generally, the government is said to fund about 45 percent of the nation’s health care bill. This figure is too low because it omits the cost of government employees’ health insurance and other health-care costs incurred by the government. When these costs are considered, the government funds about 65 percent of total health-care costs, as previously mentioned.