Medicare effects on research

As of now the US Healthcare system is made up of multiple different private and public institutions. The "medicare for all" proposal is shifting this system to single-payer system making it much more consolidated. As of now people only think of the benefits this has on the quality of health care, but there is also the factor of the advancement of healthcare.

Research

First off, medical research is not one type of research. There are many different forms it

comes in, but a very popular one is using clinical trials. This usually involves thousands of participants over a period of time. As a result researchers need to keep tabs on these participants and so they can follow up and compare past and present data. Now with the structure of America's healthcare system this process is greatly complicated. The fragmented structure leads to long processes and having to pull data from multiple sources. Overall, it just makes the process more complicated than it has to be. Using some form of a single-payer system has been shown to decrease this clutter and improve research.

Data

• A great example comes from the UK Biobank which included 500,000 participants. Through the UK's single-payer system, NHS, the Biobank was easily able to record

and track data from all the participants. It was unlike America's system that involves many different processes and sources. This system consolidated their data and ultimately improved their research.

• Another example from the UK is how by using NHS conducting a clinical trial usually costing hundreds of millions of dollars ended up costing only $13 million. This was done by lowering trial recruitment costs,

As shown through the UK's partnership with NHS, their single-payer system, they were able to speed up their research process while also reducing the costs. It shows us that using a single-payer system in America would have beneficial effects to the improvement of American health care and medicine.

Thomson, Blake, et al. “What ‘Medicare for All’ Could Mean for US Medical Research.” Circulation, vol. 140, no. 19, 2019, pp. 1527–1529., https://doi.org/10.1161/circulationaha.119.042211.