Yes.

“Medicare for All” would increase federal spending by roughly $3 trillion annually, according to some estimates.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson says he supports the idea, which would replace most private health insurance with federally funded “single-payer” coverage, in which the government pays most medical bills.

A 2019 Urban Institute study estimated that a comprehensive single-payer system would increase federal spending by $2.8 trillion annually, largely replacing expenditures by employers, households and states.

The Congressional Budget Office subsequently projected $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in additional annual federal health care subsidies by 2030, depending on the program’s design.

But higher federal spending doesn’t necessarily mean higher overall costs: A recent Yale University analysis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, estimated that Medicare for All could reduce total annual U.S. health spending by more than $1 trillion and save an estimated 114,000 lives a year.

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Sources

• Troy Jackson for Maine: Troy's Priorities
• Congressional Budget Office: Testimony on a Single-Payer Health Care System That Is Based on Medicare’s Fee-for-Service Program
• Urban Institute: From Incremental to Comprehensive Health Reform
• Urban Institute: Don’t Confuse Changes in Federal Health Spending with National Health Spending
• Congressional Budget Office: How CBO Analyzes the Costs of Proposals for Single-Payer Health Care Systems That Are Based on Medicare’s Fee-for-Service Program: Working Paper 2020-08
• medRxiv: Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States
• Scientific American: Scientists calculated how much money and lives ‘Medicare for All’ might save—it’s a lot