Removing administrative waste frees up time for care.
Gerald Friedman 20, professor at UMass Amherst, 3/9/2020, “The Case for Medicare for All,” Wiley, https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Case+for+Medicare+for+All-p-9781509539772, kav
Eliminating cost-sharing and extending insurance to the uninsured will raise demand for services but the healthcare system will be able to handle this without extended wait times because reducing administrative waste will free up enough physician and nurse time to accommodate the increased demand. Critics misunderstand this because they mistakenly assume the system is efficient now, but in arguing that Medicare for All would dramatically increase utilization, they implicitly acknowledge that the current system rations access because so many Americans cannot afford to seek care.9 Indeed, wait times are not generally longer for public systems providing universal coverage.10 Where wait times are significantly longer, it is because countries choose to focus spending on what they see as higher value care. Like most countries, Canada, for example, has fewer MRI machines per capita than the US, but many more primary care doctors, allowing Canadians to see physicians almost twice as frequently as do people in the United States.11
Compared to Canada and other countries, the US has much more rationing of healthcare and longer wait times because of unaffordable costs and the lack of access to adequate insurance. More important than wait times for a few elective specialist services is the very large difference in the proportion of the sick who even try to see a doctor. Only 6% of Canadians report that in the last year they “had a medical problem but did not visit a doctor because of cost.” The proportion in the United States that did not visit a doctor because of cost is four times as large.12