Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study
In the study, nearly all the computed savings comes from two sources.1. Decrease in pharmaceutical costs as a result of better bargaining power.2. Decrease in administrative overhead, calculated by extrapolating the overhead in medicare to the entire US healthcare economy.I don't have an informed opinion on either of these estimates, but my intuition is that #1 seems reasonable while #2 seems unlikely. The justifications they give include lower executive salaries and decreased fraud. From what I have been told by healthcare professionals, medicare has less incentive to negotiate cost, less incentive to investigate fraud, and therefore lower administrative cost.