Giving Compass' Take:

• Alexander Sammon explains that doctors' student debt may impede Medicare for All as doctors might protest lower pay. 

• How can funders help to reduce student debt for current and future students? Is debt relief viable? 

• Learn about support for Medicare for All. 

Where Medicare for All was once denigrated for being too expensive to implement, advocates have begun to point out that it might be cost-effective. Recent studies have shown that a Medicare for All program, like the bill recently introduced in the House, would expand coverage to those uninsured, cut out-of-pocket expenses, and save somewhere between $2 trillion and $5 trillion over the course of 10 years. Even a study from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center seemingly concurred on this data point.

Some of the savings would come from curtailing the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, which have parlayed lax regulations and absent price controls into runaway gains. The price of private insurance premiums increased at nearly twice the rate of Medicare costs from 1969 to 2009; removing profit-generating private insurers would create instant savings. But saving may also come from cuts to another expensive sector of the health-care market: doctor pay.

While doctors' wages don't get nearly as much air time in the health-care debate, they, too, are inordinately high when compared to peer nations. American physicians "make roughly twice as much on average as their counterparts in other wealthy countries," says Dean Baker, senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. With average annual pay for American doctors close to $300,000 (even after malpractice insurance), Baker points out that we "pay an extra $100 billion a year in doctor salaries" over comparable nations across the 900,000 doctors in the U.S. That breaks down to more than $700 per household per year.

As Medicare for All makes its way through debate in the House and inches closer to legislative viability, the prospect of cuts in wages is likely to turn some doctors off. As one study from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst has shown, the plan would require cuts to doctor pay of between 10 and 13 percent, with highly paid specialists shouldering the bulk it, as higher reimbursements from certain private insurers would disappear with the insurers themselves. "If it were up to me," says Baker, "the cuts would be much larger."

Read the full article about Medicare for All and student debt relief by Alexander Sammon at Pacific Standard.