A recent study by researchers affiliated with Yale University, published as a preprint on medRxiv, concludes that Medicare for All in the United States would save approximately 114,000 American lives and $1 trillion per year through reduced administrative overhead, lower pharmaceutical prices, less fraudulent billing, and fewer avoidable emergency-room visits. More than $200 billion currently goes to insurance-company executives. The study is headed for peer review, and earlier research had found similar, though smaller, benefits—roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion annually.
Contrast this with the policies of the Trump era and the Republicans: massive tax cuts benefiting primarily top earners—around $1.1 trillion for individuals with incomes of approximately $500,000 or more—cuts to Medicaid, and the failure to extend subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Projections indicate that these measures will cause up to 15 million Americans to lose their health insurance coverage over the coming decade, resulting in well over 114,000 avoidable deaths.
No other developed nation lacks universal health coverage and allows people to die for lack of private insurance so that insurance-company CEOs can maintain large profit margins. In those countries, government-run insurance systems deliver care at roughly half the U.S. cost, with far less administrative waste and denial of care.
Medicare for All polls at about 65% support, yet it is portrayed by Trump Republicans as radical, even though roughly two-thirds of Americans favor it. Both Republican messaging—which relies on the “socialist” smear—and corporate Democrats claim that Medicare for All is unaffordable or impossible.
Corporate media will never honestly cover the potential cost savings of Medicare for All because major shareholders such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have interests aligned against it. The persistent opposition may reflect a deeper desire to keep some people without care, raising questions about possible depopulation motives, especially after the pandemic. This claim can certainly be disputed, but it raises a broader question about whether the deaths and suffering caused by the system are merely tolerated as an unavoidable byproduct of profit maximization.
There is also a glaring double standard: U.S. politicians and media call domestic universal healthcare “socialism,” yet do not apply the same label to Israel, which already has universal healthcare.
The profit-driven nature of the U.S. private insurance system has not primarily the cure of patients in sight, but rather to provide ongoing treatment that generates revenue for companies such as businesses like Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna.
The same double standard applies to social benefits. Domestic recipients are branded as “welfare queens” (social freeloaders), while Israel receives hundreds of billions in US aid and simultaneously affords universal healthcare and free higher education—benefits denied to Americans themselves. By this logic, Israel would be the ultimate “welfare queen,” subsidized by corrupt US politicians who effectively operate on an “Israel first, America last” principle.
The idea that elites are deliberately trying to kill Americans may be disputed. A more plausible interpretation is that the donor class, corporations, and foreign governments are simply extracting maximum wealth from the system, with the resulting deaths and suffering being a byproduct of indifference rather than an explicit objective.
A Yahoo Finance/Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report says that middle-income Americans face an average $900 tax increase in 2026 under Trump’s legislation, while temporary breaks—such as those involving Social Security and tips—expire, while permanent cuts for the wealthy and corporations remain.
The entire system is based on legalized bribery through campaign finance: politicians extract taxes from the public and redistribute them upward to donors, corporations, and foreign interests, while much of the media denies or ignores the dynamic. The result is preventable domestic deaths, unnecessary foreign wars (mostly on behalf of Israel), and an erosion of democracy.
The only durable solution is to remove money from politics through a constitutional amendment. Otherwise, the cycle of corruption will continue.
Corporate and large-donor money—including money from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and now extremely wealthy individuals such as Elon Musk—is at the root of the problem. Lobbyists often draft legislation, and most members of Congress function as puppets, though a few resist. Voters have at long last begun defeating well-funded incumbents, such as Haley Stevens, who appeared secure because of money and endorsements but nevertheless faced unexpected political pressure.
People across the political spectrum need to keep pressuring and voting out incumbents who take large sums from special interests, including the Israeli lobby. Voters should treat nearly all of them as crooks unless proven otherwise and prioritize getting money out of politics so that legislation can eventually serve the broader public rather than facilitate the permanent upward transfer of wealth—the permanent robbery by the donor class.