On Wednesday Governor Deval Patrick submitted his proposal for the state budget pertaining to 2015’s fiscal year. Rounding out at approximately $36 billion, the proposal now moves over to the Massachusetts House of Representatives for further revision. But how does it compare to budgets of yore? The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center has the answer.
MassBudget boasts an interactive graph and spreadsheet that compare Governor Patrick’s submission to past budgets going back to 2001. Interestingly, the FY 2015 budget isn’t the most extravagant in recent memory – that distinction is given to 2005, when, adjusted for inflation, the budget was nearly $40.5 billion – but it does show how the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed in record fashion.
According to the data, healthcare costs will run Massachusetts some $17 billion, which, if that doesn’t seem outrageous enough, is up from approximately $8 billion the year before and $7.7 billion prior to that.
Two notable candidates for governor, Joe Avellone and Don Berwick, have addressed this issue head-on and both are calling for substantial reform. Berwick, former head of Medicare and Medicaid for the Obama Administration, has a storied background as a healthcare executive while Avellone has pledged to cut one percent of the healthcare budget to free up over $100 million annually.
Stay tuned to BostInno for more information regarding the state budget as it makes its way through both chambers of the Massachusetts legislature.
For more information on Governor Patrick’s budget proposal, you can view the overview here. For more in depth details on how the budget was crafted and why, you can read the budgetary process and actual budget here.
Update: From MassBudget:
Nick, thanks for highlighting our Budget Browser. Readers, I just want to point out a technical problem – for which we are responsible – that leads to misleading data in one of the graphs above. In one of the graphs it shows net state health care costs as essentially doubling in 2015. That is not accurate. We are in the process of loading the 2015 data into the browser and have loaded the spending data but not the federal revenue data. Medicaid, or major state health insurance program, receives about half of its funding from the federal government. We haven’t yet entered that data. When we do, it will show much, much less of an increase in net state health care costs in 2015. We should not have made it possible to view that screen until all of the data was entered. We have now taken it down from our site until the data is all entered. Sorry for the confusion.
