Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (screenshot)
What does Maura Healey think of single-payer healthcare?
It never came up during her 2022 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, but in the past, she told a left-of-center advocacy group that she supports it.
Healey, the state’s current governor, and former attorney general, told the Progressive Change Campaign Committee on a 2014 questionnaire that she supports state-level single-payer health care, which means a health care system run and completely funded by the state government.
Here is how Healey’s answer looks on this questionnaire:
YES [X ] NO [ ] Do you support state-level single-payer health care?
Healey, a Democrat, filled out this questionnaire during her first run for attorney general. NewBostonPost could not find any public statements from Healey in favor of state-level single-payer health care since filling out this questionnaire.
No state in America has single-payer health care.
Former Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, unsuccessfully attempted to implement a single-payer health care system in Vermont in 2014. Under Shumlin’s failed plan, state income tax would have increased by 9 percentage points and all employers would have had an 11.5 percentage point payroll tax increase, as Vox points out.
Proponents of single-payer health care argue that access to high-quality medical care is a human right and that the private, for-profit health care industry is inefficient. Opponents argue that it’s too expensive, it’s wrong for the government to throw people off of private health insurance plans that they like, and that it could reduce the quality of care that insured patients receive; some opponents also argue that there is no human right to medical care.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, opposes single-payer health care. He voiced his opposition to the Medicare-for-All proposal espoused by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“And look, the fact is, before Bernie was straightforward about raising middle-class taxes,” Biden said at a Nashua rally attended by a NewBostonPost reporter in February 2020. “Now, he and the other supporters of Medicare-for-All won’t tell you how much it costs or who’s gonna pay for it. They used to say it’s $30 trillion and there’d be a middle-class tax increase, but not anymore. Now he says, ‘Nobody knows what it will cost.’ Who’s gonna pay for it? He says, ‘We’re gonna find out’.”
As Biden pointed out, supporters of single-payer health care in the United States, including Sanders, have generally avoided discussing the cost of such programs.
In January 2020 on CBS Evening News, Sanders told host Norah O’Donnell when asked how much his plans would cost, “Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict.”
A press spokesman for Healey could not be reached for comment on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday this week.
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Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (screenshot) 
