Candidates for Governor of Massachusetts: How their backgrounds in healthcare prepare them for the job

I’ve learned a lot about the candidates for Governor of Massachusetts by interviewing all nine of them about healthcare policy. Starting today I’ll be summarizing the results from those discussions so readers can compare the candidates on specific issues. The candidates have diverse backgrounds: from head of Medicare to surgeon to small business owner to Homeland Security official. Of the nine, five have significant healthcare experience. Even those that don’t come from healthcare have taken the time to study the issues and develop deep perspectives. I asked everyone to describe how their backgrounds, especially in healthcare, prepared them for the job of Governor. Here are higlights of those answers. Don Berwick has an international and national reputation in healthcare. He’s a pediatrician who founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and more recently ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an $800 billion federal agency.  To put things in perspective, that budget is about 20x the size of the entire Massachusetts state budget. He pointed to his experience motivating the 5500 CMS employees and his conviction that government employees “are just as eager to be proud of their work, and just as amenable to learning about modern approaches to improvement as any workforce” if they have the right leadership. He wants to bring that approach to the Massachusetts government workforce. Joe Avellone reflected on two major th...
Source: Health Business Blog - Category: Health Managers Authors: Tags: Policy and politics Source Type: blogs