New op-ed explains why America''s for-profit health system is a actually a mass killer Imagine waking up to a headline that reads, "Atlanta Demolished by Nuclear Bomb," and learning that the city''s 498,715 residents were dead. The shock to our society would be unimaginable. And yet, we just learned that the American health system killed more people than that in the last two years alone and hardly anyone noticed. The fact that we''ve also wasted more than a trillion dollars barely merits an afterthought. The figures are laid out in a new report from the National Academy of Sciences. The goal of the report is to calculate how many lives we could have saved and how much less money we would have spent if a single-payer health system had been in place before the COVID-19 pandemic. Its conclusion? More than 338,000 lives would have been saved between January 2020 and March 2022, and the country would have saved more than $105 billion in hospital expenses. But that''s just part of the story. Even without a pandemic, the authors conclude that we would have experienced 77,675 needless deaths and added costs of $438 billion every year because we''ve refused to adopt a single-payer system.