How Medicare saves lives

 From a post by Doctor James Gundlach

Here I will start with the conclusion: Here are the numbers:

From 1999 through 2023 age 20-54 deaths = 8,330,842 deaths. If their deaths had changed like the age 65-84 it would have been 6,486,057. That is 1,844,785 [averaging roughly 76,000 per year], or 22.1% fewer.

Medicare is America's public free healthcare, which can be accessed after you turn 65.  This is presumably what Gundlach means by "socialist".   Everybody else has to pay for their healthcare, including any excesses over what the health insurance company will pay.  Most workers get health insurance through their employers, but obviously, their take-home pay is reduced from what it would otherwise be, in effect, a sort of payroll tax.  However, the fact that there are still out-of-pocket expenses makes getting sick horribly expensive in the USA.  The country spends 19% of GDP on healthcare, compared with 9% in Australia, which has a free health system for everybody.  However, the health outcomes in Australia (and other developed countries with free health care) are superior to those in the US. 

In Gundlach's chart, note how both sets of annual death rates rose during Covid, but for those paid for by the government were much lower than those who had to pay for their health care out of their own pockets.