Berwick Platform: ‘Seriously’ Explore Single Payer, Review Cost Control

Granted, a candidate releasing his platform on health care for a race that’s a full year away might not strike you as big breaking news. But what if that candidate is one of the country’s leading health policy thinkers? And what if he’s stepping right into territory that proved highly contentious on the federal level?

That candidate is Dr. Donald Berwick, former chief of Medicare in the Obama administration, and that territory is the idea of a “single-payer” system — a sort of “Medicare for all” that’s common in other developed countries but that faces some strong opposition in the United States. (On the national political scene, Berwick took some major flak from opponents for expressing enthusiasm for Great Britain’s National Health Service.)

Berwick released his official health care platform for Massachusetts this morning, and it includes these two points — Chapter 224 refers to the state’s latest health reform, aimed at controlling costs...