Medicare for All in Massachusetts

Healthcare is a human right, and the fight for Medicare for All is what brought Erika into politics on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. As a former EMT, she understands what our broken profit-driven system does to the workers who hold it together and to the patients who fall through its cracks. Massachusetts spends over $128 billion a year on healthcare, and more than 40 percent of that goes to insurance company administrative waste, monopolistic drug pricing, and billing bureaucracy that makes no one healthier. Medicare for All would cut our healthcare costs by 23 percent in its first year alone. The collapse of Steward Health Care showed us exactly what happens when private equity runs our hospitals. We must build a system that puts patients before profit.

Erika Knows This System From the Inside

Erika worked as an EMT in college, and it was the hardest job she has ever held. She transported hundreds of patients who, on top of their medical emergency, were consumed with anxiety about what the ambulance ride would cost, and she knew her private ambulance company would bill them at least $1,000 while paying her $13 an hour. She watched the system fail people over and over until they needed emergency care that earlier treatment would have prevented, and she asked the question that has driven her ever since: who is profiting off of our basic human rights? Then she lived the patient's side of it too, hospitalized for over a week right out of college and handed a $20,000 bill, while her insurance company hunted for an error in her file to get out of paying at all. That experience is all too familiar for working people, and it is why Erika does not treat healthcare as one issue among many. It is the fight that brought her into politics.

Where Your Healthcare Dollars Actually Go

Massachusetts spends over $128 billion a year on healthcare, more per person than almost anywhere on earth, and the leading economic analysis of the Massachusetts Medicare for All bill found that roughly $54 billion of it is pure waste. Hospitals charging far above what Medicare pays for the same care. An army of billers and coders fighting an army of claim-deniers, paperwork that costs billions while treating no one. Insurance company overhead and profit. Drug and device prices that negotiation would cut nearly in half. Fraud and duplicate billing that a fragmented system cannot catch. Every dollar of it comes out of your premiums, your deductibles, and your paycheck, and not one dollar of it makes anyone healthier.

How Medicare for All Saves Us All Money

Here is what the insurance industry does not want you to understand: we are not being asked to spend more on healthcare. We already spend more than enough. Medicare for All reorganizes the money we already spend, and the arithmetic is on our side.

Under the Massachusetts Medicare for All bill, 58 percent of the funding is public money already flowing through the system today: Medicare, Medicaid, and existing state health programs. The rest comes from fair contributions that replace premiums, deductibles, and copays entirely: employers contribute a percentage of payroll that costs most of them less than the premiums they pay now, and workers contribute a small percentage of wages instead of the thousands of dollars a year that premiums, deductibles, and copays take today. The analysis found that everyone earning under $500,000 a year comes out ahead, that the largest savings go to working households earning under $75,000, and that over 98 percent of Massachusetts households would spend less on healthcare than they do now.

And the system as a whole saves money while covering more care: every resident insured, no copays and no deductibles, and Medicaid payment rates finally raised so that patients with MassHealth can actually find a doctor. After reinvesting in all of that expanded care, Massachusetts still comes out ahead by nearly $30 billion in the first year, a 23 percent reduction in what we spend, with a surplus built in for contingencies. Universal quality healthcare will save all of us money, and healthcare is a human right. We can and must do both at once.

Private Equity Is Looting Our Care

The collapse of Steward Health Care showed every person in Massachusetts what happens when private equity runs hospitals: investors extracted the value, sold the land out from under the buildings, loaded the system with debt, and walked away rich while patients lost care and thousands of healthcare workers' jobs were thrown into chaos. And hospitals are only the beginning, because the same playbook is running through nursing homes and hospice care, where the people are most vulnerable and the extraction is easiest to hide. Erika voted to overhaul how the Commonwealth regulates and monitors the healthcare market in the wake of the Steward crisis, with rigorous review of hospital expansions and real accountability in the industry, and she will fight to finish the job. She will also fight for the workers who hold the system together, for safe patient limits so that care is never sacrificed to cut costs, and for real protections against the violence that nurses and healthcare workers face on the job.

Protecting Care From Washington

Trump's policies are putting over 300,000 Massachusetts residents at risk of losing MassHealth coverage, and the cuts land hardest on the community health centers and safety-net hospitals that entire neighborhoods depend on. Erika will fight to protect MassHealth and community health centers from every federal cut, because no one in Massachusetts should lose care over what happens in Congress. And she will keep making the larger argument: the only permanent protection from federal sabotage is a Massachusetts system that guarantees care to everyone as a right, funded by us, governed by us, and answerable to patients instead of shareholders.

The Unfinished Agenda

In the Senate, Erika will keep organizing with nurses, healthcare workers, patients, and the Medicare for All coalition she has been part of since before she was ever elected. And she will fight to:

• Pass Medicare for All in Massachusetts. A single payer system covering every resident with no premiums, no copays, and no deductibles, replacing waste with care and saving 98 percent of households money.
• Kick private equity out of healthcare. Real public oversight, full ownership transparency, and an end to the looting playbook in our hospitals, nursing homes, and hospice care.
• Protect patients and the healthcare workforce. Safe patient limits, protections against workplace violence, and a system where staffing decisions answer to patient safety instead of cost-cutting.
• Stop healthcare deserts before they form. Real notice and community protection before any hospital or essential service is closed, so no community is cut off from care.
• Defend MassHealth and community health centers from federal cuts, with the state stepping up so no patient loses coverage because of Washington.