Press Release: 2/5/2026
Mass-Care: the Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Health Care announces the release of the economic report: Funding Universal Health Care in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
For immediate release
Contact: Kimberley Connors, Executive Director, director@masscare.org, (617) 297-8011
by Auden Cote-L’Heureux and Gerald Friedman
This is a report on the economic results of implementing An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts, a bill before the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing. We invite you to read the report (linked in the title above and available at Economic Analysis – Mass-Care) and see how tens of billions of dollars could be saved annually through the Massachusetts Health Care Trust. A detailed analysis is done of our current spending, savings that could be realized, and expanded coverage to have Universal Health Care. The question of how we pay for it is answered along with showing that 98% of residents would save money.
Please join us for a Zoom presentation by Auden Cote-L'Heureux, one of the co-authors, on Thursday February 26 at 7pm. Please register at https://actionnetwork.org/events/paying-for-the-massachusetts-health-care-trust.
Auden is also available for questions and interviews at acotelheureu@umass.edu.
Rising health care costs expose the limits of the current system. They are the consequence of unconstrained pricing, administrative waste, and being at the mercy of for-profit firms and private equity.
An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts (H.1405/S.860) offers a structurally different approach. By creating the Massachusetts Health Care Trust, a single-payer public health insurance system, the bill replaces fragmented financing with unified budgeting, negotiated provider payments, and global cost controls.
Funding Universal Health Care in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts calculates current annual health care expenditures at $128.57 billion. The Massachusetts Health Care Trust would eliminate $54.53 billion of unnecessary spending, over 42% of current spending, by reducing burdensome billing expenses, administrative waste in the insurance industry, monopolistic pricing of drugs and medical devices and in hospitals, and fraud.
About half of that savings, $24.67 billion, would be used to finance health care improvements: expanding coverage to the uninsured, removing barriers to access, and correcting the underpayment of Medicaid and Medicare services.
The remaining savings, $29.87 billion, would be returned to the state economy: to individuals and families, employers, cities and towns, and the Commonwealth. In the first year alone, the proposed Act would bring down total health care costs from $128.57 billion to $98.70 billion, over 23% less than current spending.
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Mass-Care’s mission is to establish a Single Payer health care system in Massachusetts so that all residents of the Commonwealth will have access to comprehensive, quality, and equitable health care, publicly financed and free of out-of-pocket cost at point-of-care, with free choice of practitioners, because it is basic to life and human dignity. The Mass-Care Coalition is now over 110 organizations.
www.masscare.org / 617-297-8011 / info@masscare.org