STATE HOUSE – Rep. Shawn Dooley wants Massachusetts to play hard to get, at least when it comes to presidential politics.
The Norfolk Republican last week filed a bill to change the way the Bay State metes out its Electoral College votes for presidential candidates to allow the 11 votes be split by congressional district, similar to how Maine and Nebraska award their electoral votes.
For sheer accumulation of elite institutional prestige, it's hard to top Atul Gawande. He is a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health and a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, where I've enjoyed reading and learning from some of his brilliant and fair-minded past work.
Dr. Gawande greeted the news of Donald Trump's election and its impact on heath-care policy with this gem: "eliminating Obamacare isn't going to stop the unnerving rise in families' health-care costs; it will worsen it. There are only two ways to assure people that if they get cancer or diabetes (or pregnant) they can afford the care they need: a single-payer system or a heavily regulated private one, with the kind of mandates, exchanges, and subsidies that Obama signed into law."
