Medicare For All: Health Care Now An Issue in Massachusetts Governor Race

Should Medicare be expanded to cover everyone, not only Americans ages 65 and older? A candidate for governor of Massachusetts, one of five Democrats seeking their party’s nomination for that state’s highest office, placed that question squarely at the heart of the campaign — and if Donald Berwick succeeds, the proposal known as “Medicare For All,” could move front and center on the national stage.

In 2006, Massachusetts passed a health care reform bill, signed by then-Governor Mitt Romney, that created a system on the state level very similar to the health care reform bill known as “Obamacare” that passed the U.S. congress in 2010.

Berwick, who was the top Medicare administrator in the Obama administration for 18 months, now says that Massachusetts should again take the lead in putting in place yet another new health care system, this time, a state version of Medicare For All.

The 68-year-old Berwick is a pediatrician with three Harvard degrees who has never held elective office, but is president of the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a group that studies how to improve health care systems worldwide.

Of the five Democratic candidates in the race, Berwick is considered a “second tier” contender, behind co-frontrunners Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, and State Treasurer Steve Grossman. But current Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick won his election never having held office before, as did Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Berwick hopes his Medicare For All proposal will get him there as well.

“Health care is a human right, period,” Berwick has said. But the candidate makes clear that he is not calling for a goverment-run health care system.

“Alarmists will ring the ‘big government’ gong,” he wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The Springfield Republican newspaper. “They’ll warn about a government takeover of health care under a single payer system. Don’t believe it. Having a single unified, publicly accountable insurance system would simplify payment, lower costs, and facilitate high standards and bold goals for better health and care.”

Only health care payments would be consolidated under a single entity, which he says could be a government body or a newly created public utilty corporation. But the current, “highly pluralistic care system, maintaining our current range of patient choices, including private and public hospitals, clinics, and doctors,” would remain as is, says Berwick, explaining his Medicare For All platform.