RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders , an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is once again pressing his signature healthcare proposal, and this time he has new research behind him.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, issued a statement Tuesday after Yale University researchers released a study concluding that his Medicare for All legislation would save 114,000 lives a year and cut national healthcare spending by more than $1 trillion annually.
"This study confirms what we have known for years: Medicare for All saves lives and saves money," Sanders said. "It would cost $1 trillion less than our current dysfunctional system."
The push arrives as Medicare for All is enjoying a resurgence within the Democratic Party, driven by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned and progressive candidates who have made the policy central to recent primary wins.
Newsweek reached out to Sanders' office for comment Tuesday.
A string of recent Democratic primary wins has given Sanders and the progressive movement new momentum behind Medicare for All, the signature healthcare proposal that the senator has pushed for nearly a decade. The DSA lists Medicare for All among its core platform planks.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned for three progressive congressional candidates who won their June primaries. In Colorado, Melat Kiros upset longtime incumbent Representative Diana DeGette. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Sanders and Mamdani, defeated Representative Haley Stevens in the state's Senate primary while campaigning heavily on Medicare for All.
In Maine's crucial U.S. Senate battle, progressive populist Troy Jackson has also made Medicare for All central to his campaign against Republican Senator Susan Collins.
Sanders has pushed some version of Medicare for All in the Senate for nearly a decade without success. He introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2017 with 16 Democratic co-sponsors. That year, a single-payer floor amendment failed by a vote of zero to 57, with 42 Democrats and Sanders voting present rather than yes.
Sanders reintroduced the bill in 2019 with 14 Senate co-sponsors, short of a majority within his own caucus. Versions followed in 2022 and again in April 2025, when Sanders introduced the current bill, S. 1506. Not one has advanced past the Senate Finance Committee. Becker's Payer Issues, an industry trade publication, noted this summer that Sanders' "annual pitch for a universal system remains stuck in committee, as it has in every Congress since he first introduced it." Centrist Democrats have instead pursued narrower measures, including a public option bill known as the CHOICE Act.
The Yale analysis, led by epidemiologist Alison Galvani, found that Medicare for All would cut total U.S. healthcare spending by nearly 20 percent, according to the Sanders release. The savings would come from paying no more than other wealthy countries for prescription drugs, eliminating administrative waste, curbing fraudulent billing and reimbursing providers more fairly.
Researchers estimated the plan would prevent 114,000 deaths annually, including more than 33,000 among currently uninsured Americans and more than 20,000 tied to coverage losses under Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill" tax and spending law. A previous Galvani-led study, published in The Lancet in 2020, found an earlier version of the plan would save roughly 68,000 lives and $450 billion a year.
Not every study reaches the same conclusion. The most-cited counterpoint is a 2018 analysis by Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian-leaning think tank tied to Koch family funding. Blahous found Sanders' plan would raise federal health spending by $32.6 trillion over 10 years, more than the government could raise even by doubling all federal income tax collection.
Sanders' office called the study "grossly misleading and biased." The dispute since has centered on one line in Blahous' findings: "under his most generous assumptions, total national health spending would decline by about $2 trillion over the decade even as federal spending rose sharply." Sanders cited that as proof the plan would save money overall. Blahous has said the assumed payment cuts were unrealistic.
Despite the "radical socialist" framing often applied to Medicare for All by critics, polling on government involvement in healthcare has trended toward majority support, though numbers shift depending on how questions are worded.
Gallup found 64 percent of U.S. adults said in November 2025 that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health care coverage, the highest share since 2007. Pew Research Center found a similar trend: 66 percent of adults said the same, up from 62 percent in 2021, with the shift driven mostly by Republicans.
A November 2025 Data for Progress survey found 65 percent of likely voters supported a Medicare for All system described as replacing most private insurance, including 78 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents and 49 percent of Republicans, even after pollsters read arguments warning of higher taxes and government overreach.
Wording, however, moves the numbers considerably. A July 2026 survey by Tavern Research for the Searchlight Institute, covered by Becker's Payer Issues, found that a plan replacing private insurance outright and funded by higher taxes—the traditional Medicare for All framing—drew only 11 points of net support, far less than opt-in or automatic-enrollment versions. The same survey found 70 percent of respondents wanted to keep their current plan if given the choice.
The polling shows growing appetite for government involvement in healthcare and majority support for Medicare for All under most ...
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