39° and Overcast
Image
Deborah Devaux, chair of the Health Policy Commission's board, speaks at a hearing about health care costs on March 13, 2025.
The sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of the Bay State decision makers takes many shapes: a growing affordability crisis; looming threats from Washington; and the question of how to keep up with swollen spending appetites as the former rush of revenue has slowed down.
Gov. Maura Healey kicked off the week with an announcement that she hopes to save residents billions of dollars in energy costs over the next five years — starting with $50 back in their wallets next month.
Massachusetts is already known for its high heating prices, but during this year's frigid winter, shockingly high bills left people gasping as they opened their envelopes from National Grid and Eversource.
Healey's promised legislation targeting energy affordability wasn't ready Monday, but she announced ways to reduce household energy bills with actions that her administration could take without legislative approval.
Most of the savings are medium- or long-term solutions, but Healey also announced that residential customers who receive electricity from Eversource, National Grid and Unitil will each receive a $50 credit in April, funded by about $125 million the state collected in so-called alternative compliance payments.
"I know [$50 is] not a ton of money compared to what people have been paying, but it is something. Every dollar counts. This is yours to keep," Healey said.
Affordability is always top of mind for someone who lives in Massachusetts, but it seemed a persistent theme this week. A new report showed that health care costs in Massachusetts surged to "unsustainable" levels in 2023 and added more pressure to already-strained household budgets.
Total health care expenditures per-capita grew to $11,153 from 2022 to 2023, an 8.6% leap that was the second-largest increase since officials began tracking the annual change a decade earlier.
The soaring premiums were not even the steepest area of cost growth in that time.
At a health care cost growth hearing on Thursday, the Center for Health Information Analysis showed growth in health care premiums (6%) were dwarfed by other rising expenditures between 2021 and 2023, including on center-based child care prices (15.8%), New England housing expenses (19%) and New England food expenses (26.8%).
Child care has long been cited as one of the most expensive outlays for young families in Massachusetts, and the sector's importance was punctuated when early education and care centers closed during the pandemic forcing some parents to choose between child care and work.
Taking the pandemic as a lesson in where the state's priorities should lie, lawmakers and two administrations of governors have poured money into the sector in the five years since.
Healey is now proposing $1.8 billion in early education and care investments in her fiscal year 2026 budget — which would be nearly three times the amount the state spent in fiscal 2020.
Providers laud the investments, pointing to the still comparatively low wages of professionals who work in the space, and how essential it is to keeping the workforce productive while parents juggle jobs and family. Plus, studies show early education significantly improves a child's educational and economic outcomes later in life.
However, a waitlist of 30,000 children eligible for assistance still remains due to the high cost of care and limits on how much the state can afford. For many families sending a kid to child care is still a prohibitive expense, even as the state foots a larger and larger share of the overall bill.
The growing state investment in early care reflects a larger trend coming to light early in the annual budget process: state spending has grown so significantly over the last few years with ample pandemic-era funding that hard choices are nearing, not because revenue is performing poorly but just because it isn't pouring in.
And at the same time, everything has gotten more expensive.
Investments into the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program have boomed over the past several years, and Healey is recommending another 16% increase to the safety-net program in her budget this year — but Housing Secretary Ed Augustus says that spending increase doesn't correlate with a big surge in new vouchers.
"We're putting significant additional dollars into the voucher program, but not necessarily getting more vouchers. We're just having to pay higher rents for the vouchers that have already been leased so that we don't lose any of those units and have people fall into homelessness. So again, some of it is just, you're paying a lot more, but you're not necessarily getting more. You're trying to keep what you've got," Augustus said Wednesday.
The Cannabis Control Commission and Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development made the argument to lawmakers this week that they have had new expectations thrust upon them, and will need additional dollars to fulfill their mandates.
The labor agency says it will need a small boost — about $400,000 — to address requirements related to Uber and Lyft drivers newly being allowed to unionize, and "the recent increase in illegal strike activity in schools across the state."
The CCC, despite its recent blunders that have led to possible legislative intervention, wants its budget to increase by a third. They say it's necessary to ensure cannabis safety and to apply regulations outlined in a 2022 law, and that underinvestment in the past is what has caused many of the issues at the CCC.
As some agencies are looking for budget boosts just to keep up with inflationary pressures and maintain commitments that were previously made, others are looking for state dollars in response to Washington, D.C.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell urged lawmakers to increase funding for her office nearly 9% over what the governor recommended, saying she needs "every penny we can get" to fight the U.S president.
Campbell and her office are fighting a number of battles against the Trump administration on multiple fronts. The string of lawsuits challenge Trump's effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, federal spending cuts, Department of Government Efficiency access to personal data, and more.
Campbell joined 21 other attorneys general to sue over the Trump administration efforts to dismantle the Department of Education this week.
The department cut half its workforce on Wednesday on Trump's instructions. Massachusetts receives funding through the federal department for special education services, Title I grants for low-income families, and other education programs.
Massachusetts will lose $12.2 million in federal money that had been earmarked for schools to buy from local farms, Healey said on Monday, and had no response when a reporter asked if she had a plan to backfill the program.
"Are you kidding? You guys, I mean, I think people got to understand the scope of what we're talking about here," before redirecting to talk about $16 billion in federal funding the state counts on in its budget.
House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz told the News Service this week that in building his committee's budget, due next month, he's trying to stay focused on what the state can control.
"It's so hard to guess what is actually real and what's not real," he said. "We want to stay focused on building our budget, we have challenges within our own budget, regardless of the federal dollars, and we're working through those right now. We want to build a budget that's sustainable regardless of what the federal government does."
He continued, "That said, we have to keep an eye on it, and if we have to pivot, we will pivot. But we don't want to pivot until we know we have to, because we don't want to pivot the wrong way."
ODDS & ENDS: Boston's two (maybe three) mayoral candidates were under one roof this week as the race for City Hall heats up ... House Speaker Ron Mariano resisted the idea of getting an opinion from the Supreme Judicial Court on the question of whether a legislative audit is constitutional ... Layoffs continue at the state's largest health care system ... Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says ICE has not contacted Boston Police, but she's mindful of an "extremely serious" situation with the feds.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: After he was approved to serve as commissioner of the state's K-12 education department on top of his duties as education secretary for an interim period, Pat Tutwiler was asked if he should be addressed as "secretary" or "commissioner." "Pat is fine," he replied.
SONG OF THE WEEK: Never enough money to go around.
