The Costs of Our For-Profit Healthcare System Continue to Rise

The Financial Times recently reported that Americans are facing the biggest increase in health insurance premiums in 15 years. This comes after the announcement that the Trump administration’s budget bill will cut Medicaid funding, kicking millions of Americans off their insurance and forcing the closure of many rural hospitals.

American healthcare is already, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita healthcare costs of other developed countries, yet we have relatively poor outcomes. By numerous metrics, including preventable deaths, life expectancy, and infant mortality, we lag behind peer countries, despite spending far more than they do. Even well-off Americans with insurance tend to get sicker and die sooner than their counterparts in places like the UK and Canada.

The reason is simple—every other developed country guarantees healthcare to all citizens as a basic human right. We’re essentially the only ones that decided to turn our health into a commodity.

Between 45,000 and 68,000 Americans die each year from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. Meaning, if they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive. This shouldn’t be happening in the richest country on Earth.

Single-payer is the future of healthcare.

Historically, the costs of healthcare rise faster than wages and overall inflation. Employers often shift these costs onto workers in the form of higher premiums, co-pays, and deductibles or by dropping benefits for spouses, retirees, and part-time workers. The result is that people are being squeezed more and more. Nearly half of all Americans report struggling to afford healthcare.

It’s been demonstrated numerous times that universal healthcare would save money. Taxes would go up, but private health insurance premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay substantially less. It would just be in the form of a tax, not a premium. One report from 2020 compared 22 different cost analyses of potential single-payer initiatives at both the state and federal level and found that 19 of them projected savings (in the first year and long-term).

It’s essential that we transition to a system that prioritizes patient care over profit. Single-payer is the future of healthcare. Until the US joins the rest of the world in guaranteeing healthcare as a basic human right to all citizens, the costs will continue to balloon, as more and more Americans are needlessly bankrupted or killed.