CommonWealth Beacon staff

“There’s a place in the world for the angry young man,” wrote Billy Joel almost 50 years ago.  Unfortunately, that place seems to have expanded in our public square (for both men and women), creating echo chambers of primal screaming on both the right and left, leaving the large majority of us wondering where all the middle ground went. 

For much of the past year, I’ve been writing a series of issue briefs for CommonWealth Beacon (see below) on a variety of controversial policy topics, providing evidence-based arguments pro and con, in contrast to the bumper stickers from the left and right that too often pass for civic discourse.

Five and a half hours into a tedious rules debate at the Massachusetts State House in January 2019, acting Speaker Tom Petrolati ordered a roll call vote on a noncontroversial amendment, and voted no. Within seconds, red lights, representing “no” votes, lit up the electronic vote-tally board in the House chamber as dozens of rank-and-file members followed his lead.  

Then, realizing he had made a mistake (but not realizing his mic was still on), Petrolati stammered: “It’s a yes?… Switch ’em. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes!”  

After his vote on the large display board flipped to green for “yes,” so, too, did the votes of at least 63 Democratic representatives. (The video of this moment remains on the Legislature’s website, beginning at 5:35:49.)

Over the last two years, Massachusetts launched a bold initiative with a clear message: college is accessible again. Community college? Tuition- and fee-free for everyone. Four-year public college? Tuition- and fee-free if you’re low-income. Books, supplies, cost of living costs? Covered, up to $2,400, by stipends for those who qualify. 

These promises were backed by transformative new programs, MassReconnect and MassGrant Plus Expansion in 2023, followed by MassEducate in 2024, all made possible by the Fair Share Amendment, a surtax on millionaires that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2022 to fund public education and transportation. The rollout was visible. The message resonated. For the first time in years, students and families began to believe in public higher education again.

Health care spending in Massachusetts is just about the highest in the world. It is enough to finance health security for all of us. Health security means that we get care that’s effective, competent, quick, and kind—with no more than tiny co-payments and no worry about medical debt. To redeem the promise of plastic insurance cards, health security requires having enough good doctors, dentists, nurses, hospitals, and other caregivers where we need them.   

That doesn’t make health security for all easy to win—just easier than housing, education and job training, global warming, personal and national security, decent living standards, or the other huge challenges we face. Because we already spend enough on health care to get the job done.

When COVID arrived, in March of 2020, Dr. Paul Hattis and Dr. Jarone Lee, a critical care and emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, started a series for CommonWealth Beacon of what came to be more than a dozen interviews during the initial years of the pandemic. (You can read more here.) It has been about two and half years since their last Q&A posting. Hattis, a former professor at Tufts University Medical School and currently a fellow at the Lown Institute, decided to have a check-in discussion with Lee to see what his world is like these days and what sort of longer lasting impact Covid has had on it. This conversation has been edited for clarity.