No, I didn’t vote for Berwick in the primary but he is spot on about making health care more affordable. From an interview he did with Carey Goldberg:
I asked Dr. Berwick about the reaction to his single-payer position in his many campaign-season travels, and he said the biggest surprise was how positive the response had been from voters who would likely not call themselves progressives. They either already agreed with the idea, he said, or responded instantly after one sentence of explanation with, “That sounds right to me. Let me tell you my story.”
“I remember a carpenter in Hingham,” he said. “I don’t think he would have said he was a progressive — he was a somewhat older carpenter struggling to make ends meet, sitting on a sofa at a gathering, a meet-and-greet, and I started talking about this, and I guess — embarrassingly, to me — I was expecting some pushback. But he immediately said, ‘I’ve got to tell you a story.’ And he told me about his struggle to get health insurance.
“He very carefully went through the policy options, he had picked one that had a maximum deductible that was pretty stiff, and he was ready to swallow it. And he did, he signed up for that plan. And then, the problem was that he had three major illnesses the following year. And he discovered — to his dismay — that the deductible did not apply to the year, it applied to each separate episode. So this guy, who’s working with his hands and trying to just get through and have his family’s ends meet, suddenly found himself tens of thousands of dollars in debt, because of the complexity [of health insurance.] And he said, ‘Enough of this!’ He immediately understood and was fully on board, and that kind of experience has been pretty constant for me.”
Overall, Dr. Berwick said, “The response has been extremely positive beyond anything I would have anticipated. When I took the position, I had no polling information. I did it because I was looking at the state budget and seeing the erosive impact of rising health care costs on everything else we need to do. The numbers were stunning to me. I got briefed by the Mass. Budget Policy Center and they said — as I remember the numbers and have been quoting them — Parks and Recreation were down 25 percent, local aid was down 40 percent, higher education was down 30 percent.
You really can’t find a line item on the state budget that hasn’t been down in real terms in the last decade. Except health care is up 59 percent. That was the number that stuck in my mind when they briefed me. And as I went around the state and began to see what we need to do for schools, for transportation, for affordable housing — the term I’ve used, and it’s a bold term but it’s confiscation. It’s with benign intent, but health care is essentially taking away opportunities from public investment.”
“And then you meet with businesses and you get the same story. Businesses talk about how the continuing increase in health care costs is cutting opportunities for them to grow and develop their businesses. And then when you talk to labor — I remember meeting with the painters’ union, and I asked the person who was hosting me to show me their paychecks, and the union wage scales over the past few years — you can see it right there in black letters — the take-home pay per hour has not been going up. What is going up is contributions to health care. So the logic was strong.
“And the reactions have been consonant with those data. People are very frustrated. They don’t understand their health insurance. They can’t read their policy. They know it’s not transparent. And they are suffering from vastly increased costs.”
Also, while I’ve noted it a number of times before, T. R. Reid’s Frontline piece, “Sick Around the World” is worth watching. Reid visits five capitalist democracies which (arguably) do a better job with health care than we do. There’s lot of food for thought.