Afternoon Must-Read: Sarah Kliff: Former Obamacare Czar Don Berwick Wants to Make Single-Payer Happen

Sarah Kliff: The former Obamacare czar wants to make single-payer happen: “Don Berwick last job was running Obamacare’s implementation at the Department of Health and Human Services…

…where Republicans berated the former doctor for supporting the British health service. His next goal: bringing single-payer health care to Massachusetts. The former Medicare administrator is the only candidate in the Massachusetts governor race running on a single-payer platform. He says he settled on the idea when he was thinking through the different goals he wanted to achieve–slower health care cost growth, better quality care–all seemed most attainable when the government was the one paying everybody’s health care costs.

I began to list the policies I wanted to pursue, and then I came to the payment side…and I started to talk to the people who helped shape Vermont, looked at Vermont, and I just said, ‘oh my, there is just one straight shot here, it’s going to single-payer’. At that point it was more about thinking about putting it on the table. Now it is the entire table….