A new study claims Medicare-for-all could have saved more than 200,000 lives during the pandemic

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the poor US performance during the Covid-19 pandemic, from the highly contagious virus itself to the Trump administration’s slow response to deep fissures in US politics and culture. But a new study from a group of scholars at Yale and UMass-Amherst says the US had more deaths per capita than most economic peers due to something more specific: the lack of universal health care.

According to that paper, published this month in PNAS, at least 212,000 fewer Americans would have died of...