Medicare For All advocates come from all walks of life — including medical practice and public health research at one of the world's most prestigious universities.
From the Yale School of Medicine: "Motivated by a desire to fix a system they say consistently fails to address health disparities and contributes to poor health outcomes, members of the Yale School of Medicine community campaigned this year in favor of a local resolution supporting the passage of Medicare for All. Their work highlights the growing activism of many in the medical field who see involvement in the public sphere as a moral imperative inseparable from their health care roles.
"Annie Harper, PhD, a research scientist at the Yale Program for Recovery & Community Health, is among those who got involved. She studies the connection between money and health. She said Medicare for All, by eliminating the cost of medical care, and in particular the medical debt that millions incur, would improve health outcomes for millions of people and save the U.S. money.
"Harper explained that although we often focus our policy discussions on income inequality, 'there’s an even bigger factor influencing who is healthy and who is not: wealth inequality, a person’s savings and accumulated assets.' People who lack wealth are much more likely to incur 'bad' or high-cost debt that in turn, prevents them from building wealth."
And research from the Yale School of Public Health in Scientific American: "A new study quantifies the severity of the impact of the pandemic on Americans who did not have access to health insurance. According to findings published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, from the pandemic’s beginning until mid-March 2022, universal health care could have saved more than 338,000 lives from COVID-19 alone. The U.S. also could have saved $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease—on top of the estimated $438 billion that could be saved in a nonpandemic year.
"'Health care reform is long overdue in the U.S.,' says the study’s lead author Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health. 'Americans are needlessly losing lives and money.'"