Rep. Sabadosa, other pols again co-sponsor ‘Medicare for All’ bill

Doctor with stethoscope Zoonar/N.Okhitin
Published: 02-03-2025 11:17 AM |
During the last election cycle, voters in nearly a dozen legislative districts — including the district that includes all of Southampton — voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot question instructing their state representative to support a single-payer health care system in the state.
Riding the wave of this most recent success, state legislators Sen. Jamie Eldridge and Reps. Lindsay Sabadosa and Margaret Scarsdale have refiled legislation to establish “Medicare for All” in Massachusetts.
The bill, called “An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts” (HD.1228/SD.2341), seeks to establish the Massachusetts Healthcare Trust: a single payer of all health care costs to replace insurance companies. The trust would be financed using existing programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as four new taxes — employer payroll, employee payroll, self-employed and unearned income — that would replace and are estimated to be much lower than current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket payments.
But while proponents of the bill are hopeful that its refiling will promote productive conversations this legislative session, these proposals are far from new.
Kimberley Connors, executive director of the Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare or Mass-Care, estimates that versions of this legislation have been filed about a dozen times before without being passed.
“This is a much older movement than people realize,” Connors said.
Mass-Care is the state’s largest single-payer health care advocacy organization, with about 100 member organizations. The coalition has run its nonbinding ballot question 68 times beginning in 1998, winning each time with an average “Yes” vote percentage of 67.5% — regardless of the party that won the district.
“All 11 districts, including the two in western Mass that Trump carried — we once again won in every district,” Connors said.
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This has indicated to Mass-Care’s organizers that health care isn’t a partisan issue. But still, concerns about costs and how to handle them often create friction.
The dramatic changes the legislation proposes for health care often raise reservations among lawmakers, but Connors and others believe that dramatic change is exactly what’s needed when the current system is leaving many people behind.
“We really believe that there is a different way to look at health care,” Connors said.
Specifically, Connors said Mass-Care is against looking at health care as a “marketplace.” Instead, they hope to ensure access to quality medical care for all Massachusetts residents with lower costs and fewer inefficiencies.
“I often equate that the way it would be run would be similar to the way that paid family medical leave is run,” Connors explained, saying that it would also be a system through which everyone is taxed so they can draw from it when they need it. She emphasized that the payroll taxes proposed by the legislation would cost patients less than the out-of-pocket costs associated with insurance, which would be eliminated, saying, “people look at that, they don’t realize you wouldn’t be paying out of pocket.”
In the Legislature, Sabadosa said there are often reservations about this legislation because it looks to completely change how we pay for health care.
“This bill is a major piece of legislation,” Sabadosa said. “It is not a small undertaking.”
But especially with the recent closure of many hospitals in the state, Sabadosa said that Massachusetts is experiencing a “health care crisis” that needs addressing.
The biggest concern she hears from fellow legislators and constituents, she said, is “how will you pay for it?” Recently, Sabadosa said that one constituent reached out to her saying that they were interested in single-payer health care, but they were worried that they would pay more under that system. She said she ran the numbers with that constituent, and they found that he would pay less under the single-payer system’s payroll taxes than under his current insurance expenses.
Even if getting the bill passed into law continues to be unsuccessful, Sabadosa said she and her colleagues continue to file it because it’s “an important part of the conversation,” and the coalition of support around it “gets bigger and bigger each session.”
However, amid a rush of executive orders from President Donald Trump and widespread uncertainty about government funding and programs, Sabadosa said that much of this legislative session will likely be dedicated to discussions about public health care more generally.
Alexa Lewis can be reached at alewis@gazettenet.com.