The lives of 338,000 people who died of COVID-19 could have been saved if the United States had a universal healthcare system. That’s the finding of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study also estimates a universal healthcare system would have saved the United States $459 billion in healthcare costs in the year 2020. The study’s lead author, Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health, told Scientific American, “Medicare for All would be both an economic stimulus and life-saving transformation of our health care system. It will cost people far less than the status quo.”