While you were probably distracted by MSM nonsense, a new study came out showing that the consensus believes that MFA would cost less than the current system.



The study, published in the influential open access journal PLOS Medicine, is a systematic review of 22 single payer plans from 18 studies, published between 1991 and 2018, including 8 national cases and 14 state-level plans. It found that 20 analyses (91 percent) predicted savings over a few years, and 19 (86 percent) projected there to be immediate overall savings in year one. The team, headed by lead author Christopher Cai of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, concluded that: “In this systematic review, we found a high degree of analytic consensus for the fiscal feasibility of a single-payer approach in the US.” The authors found that studies funded by organizations across the political spectrum agreed that there were huge savings to be made by switching to a single payer system; with a median estimate of a 3.5 percent reduction in total costs in the first year alone. One area where the studies predicted gigantic savings was in healthcare administration, with estimates varying from 1.2 to 16.4 percent of total costs (with a median of 8.8 percent). Many studies also highlighted a reduction in fraud and waste that could amount to as much as five percent of all healthcare costs being eliminated.

That's an enormous savings, and the opposite of what CNN implied in the debate.

So of course this study was immediately attacked.

If you counted the studies they excluded, excluded the non-matches*, limited Friedman and Pollin to one paper each, and started in 1995 then ~half the studies would find M4A reduced NHE rather than 14%. And that conclusion still excludes many studies that prob should be counted. https://t.co/G1ZWyxSGOw — Marc Goldwein (@MarcGoldwein) January 17, 2020

First of all, why should they arbitrarily exclude papers from before 1995?

It's a suspicious condition coming from a centrist source.

But what six wasn't included in the study? Based on this Yahoo news article they excluded a CBO report from last year.



The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last year that total national health care spending under Medicare for All “might be higher or lower than under the current system depending on the key features of the new system, such as the services covered, the provider payment rates, and patient cost-sharing requirements.”

There's two points to note about this CBO report.

1) The CBO report gave no final price tag, which explains why it was left out.

But it did make some interesting statements.



"People who are currently uninsured would receive coverage and some people who are currently insured could receive additional benefits under the single-payer system, depending on its design."

...Unlike private insurers, which can experience substantial enrollee turnover over time, a single-payer system without that turnover would have a greater incentive to invest in measures to improve people’s health and in preventive measures that have been shown to reduce costs.

2) The CBO panel was stacked against MFA.



The CBO’s 19-member Panel of Health Advisers is stacked with health care executives and directors, including several who are on the payroll of pharmaceutical, health insurance, and hospital companies that are members of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), a dark money nonprofit created to fight against Medicare for All.

So even with a strong anti-MFA panel, they could still only come up with a "maybe, maybe not MFA can save money" report.

The other study left out was by the Commonwealth Fund. It also gave a "maybe, maybe not" report.

So I looked up who sits on the board of this fund:

regional president, Southern California, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan

chairman of MFS Investment Management

executive vice president of Alternative Investments for Franklin Templeton Investments

executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group

founder and CEO of Consonance Capital

Gee, insurance and Wall Street. I wonder how they feel about MFA?