Healthcare-NOW headquarters: the Massachusetts State Senate moved the state closer to implementing single payer healthcare by commissioning a single payer study - with a twist. The Senate passed an amendment that charges the state's Center for Health Information and Analysis to include in their annual reports a comparison of what the state would be spending on healthcare under a single-payer plan, with what it actually spent the previous year.

What sets this amendment apart from other single-payer studies is that if the Center finds, for any of the years 2016 through 2018, that healthcare spending would be lower while covering everyone under a single-payer system, the Center then has to develop an in-depth single-payer proposal that it would introduce to the State Legislature for consideration.

Next the bill moves to the House, where the amendment can be introduced or included in the final legislation in conference committee. 

As past Mass-Care (Massachusetts campaign for single payer) legislative chair, I am wary of how the benchmark will be set, although I agree that this is a step forward.

For more information, visit these weblinks: https://www.healthcare-now.org/sb2202/

https://www.pressherald.com/2017/11/10/massachusetts-to-study-cost-of-single-payer-health-insurance

Update from Judy, March 2018: 

•Rep, Keith Ellison has become the chief sponsor of HR676, the single-payer bill that Rep. Conyers had sponsored for many years.