“When it comes to prescription drugs, there is no supply limit as there is with hospital beds in the case of hospital care,” Gaffney said. “So we probably would expect a more unconstrained increase in prescription drug use after Medicare-for-all, relative to hospital care.”
It’s also possible that expanding insurance extends coverage mostly to people who aren’t at high risk of hospitalization, like young, healthy people who rarely see doctors, said Dr. Anupam Jena, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who wasn’t involved in the study.
“It’s very clear from many studies that insurance expansion or insurance coverage raises health care costs, despite the argument sometimes made that better insurance leads to better primary care which then leads to lower overall costs,” Jena said by email. “That isn’t true—insuring more people costs more money, but for a wealthy society such as ours, that in many people’s minds is still the right thing to do.”
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