Just before Sunday’s Democratic primary debate in South Carolina, Bernie Sanders released the details of his Medicare-for-All universal healthcare proposal, saying it is “time for our country to join every other major industrialized nation on Earth and guarantee health care to all citizens as a right, not a privilege.”

The plan (pdf), also known as single-payer healthcare, builds on the successes of both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), “eliminating expensive and wasteful private health insurance,” and saving taxpayers money by “dramatically reducing overall health care costs and bringing down skyrocketing prescription drug prices which are far greater in the United States than in any other country.”

According to the Sanders campaign:

An academic analysis (pdf) released alongside the proposal shows that it would save $6 trillion over the next 10 years compared to the current system.

“Instead of being held hostage to a corporate system based on profits and price gouging, with Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan we can finally have a system based on patient need.”
—RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United

“The net savings from single payer come from reduced spending on administrative activities, in both private insurers and providers’ offices, reduced spending on monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and a slowdown in the growth of spending because of controls on administrative costs and drug prices,” University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman states in the analysis.

Friedman’s calculations show that the typical family earning $50,000 a year would save nearly $6,000 annually in health care costs. “The average working family now pays $4,955 in premiums for private insurance and spends another $1,318 on deductibles for care that isn’t covered,” the campaign said in a statement. “Under Sanders’ plan, a family of four earning $50,000 would pay just $466 per year to the Medicare-for-all program.”