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There’s plenty of blame to go around for the poor US performance during the Covid-19 pandemic, from the highly contagious virus itself to the Trump administration’s slow response to deep fissures in US politics and culture. But a new study from a group of scholars at Yale and UMass-Amherst says the US had more deaths per capita than most economic peers due to something more specific: the lack of universal health care.
According to that paper, published this month in PNAS, at least 212,000 fewer Americans would have died of Covid-19 in 2020 alone if the US had a single-payer health care system similar to the Medicare-for-all plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The country would have also saved $105 billion in pandemic-related health care costs.