The Codcast

The Codcast with Bill Weld by CommonWealth Beacon

Can Hampshire College rise, if not from the dead, from the higher ed death watch list? Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen has predicted that as many as half of all US colleges and universities will close or go bankrupt over the next decade, and a year ago it looked like Hampshire would be one of them. The Amherst college, founded in 1970 with a commitment to rethinking traditional...

There’s a back to the future feel to some of the changes taking place in US health care, and Atrius Health, which provides care to some 740,000 patients, is a leading player in that effort in Massachusetts. After years of soaring health care costs, there is growing interest in moving away from the fee-for-service model that has long dominated care, where providers are paid for each patient interac...

There is a struggle going on for the soul of the Massachusetts Republican Party between Trump loyalists who control the party apparatus and a more moderate brand of Republicanism espoused by Gov. Charlie Baker. The state party is headed by Jim Lyons, a social and economic conservative who said in a recent email to state Republicans that President Trump’s economy is working for Massachusetts reside...

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s “City to City” program sets out to take Boston civic and business leaders to other cities so they can expand their thinking on challenges at home by learning about policies and practices elsewhere. Walsh, who was part of the program’s trip earlier this month to Los Angeles, has clearly taken that mission to heart. Appearing on The Codcast, Walsh repeatedly...

FOR THE Massachusetts High Technology Council, blocking a transportation revenue package is a two-step process. The first step, which proved successful last week, was convincing House leaders to put off any action on a revenue package until next year. Chris Anderson, president of the council, argued on the CommonWealth Codcast that delaying action at least until January will give lawmakers more ti...

Monica Bharel, the state’s public health commissioner, is definitely a glass-half-full type of person. On the Health or Consequences edition of the Codcast with Paul Hattis of Tufts University Medical School and John McDonough of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Bharel went through a series of major challenges facing her agency and in each instance ended her discussion on an optimistic...

In this second installment of MassINC Insights, we hear from the journalists and thought leaders of MassINC about the education funding debate. As lawmakers on Beacon Hill approach agreement on a school finance package, MassINC members dig in to the history of Massachusetts school funding that’s led up to this landmark bill. Plus, a piece of the legislation calls for schools’ accountability for th...

The derailment on the Red Line in June may have been a turning point. After Gov. Charlie Baker visited the crash site, he decided it was time to accelerate repairs on the MBTA and greenlight more shutdowns of the system to speed up projects. The derailment also galvanized the debate over new transportation revenues – for the MBTA and the state as a whole. The state’s business organizations weighed...

This week on The Codcast, we bring you an episode of MassINC Insights, the first installment in a series of conversations with the journalists, researchers, and pollsters of MassINC, The MassINC Polling Group and CommonWealth. The nonprofit consistently leads the way in producing nonpartisan research and independent reporting that make serious waves in the Bay State. And today, we're pulling back...

JAY KAUFMAN, THE former state rep from Lexington, remembers a conversation he had with House Speaker Robert DeLeo the last time the Legislature considered raising taxes to pay for transportation. It was 2013, the morning before the House vote on a bill that would raise the gas tax 3 cents, index that tax to inflation (later rescinded by voters), jack up tobacco taxes, and impose a tax (later jetti...

Richard Parr, the research director of the MassINC Polling Group, said he was surprised at the strong support in a statewide, online poll for regional rail and a number of other ambitious transportation initiatives, including an underground rail link connecting North and South Stations. The most popular initiative was transitioning the commuter rail fleet from diesel to electric power. The poll al...

SUFFOLK COUNTY Sheriff Steve Tompkins insists his decision to sever ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement had nothing to do with protests, and everything to do whether the people in his jail’s cells are destined to remain in the state. “I was hired to do local, not federal work. The ICE population is transient — they’re not staying here,” Tompkins said on CommonWealth’s Codcast. “But the l...

Congresswoman Katherine Clark supports the idea of opening facilities where people can use illegal drugs under medical supervision to prevent overdose fatalities and refer people to treatment for drug addiction when they are ready. “These sites, in particular, if it is saving some lives, if it is allowing us to have the intervention to stop this cycle before a person does lose their life to an ove...

Seven months ago the MBTA’s oversight board indicated it was going to weigh in on whether the Legislature should explore new transportation funding initiatives, but since then there’s been nothing. Joe Aiello, the chair of the Fiscal and Management Control Board, said the timing was not right back then. But soon it will be, he says, pointing out that there have been some new developments on the re...

KATE WALSH says she favors Medicaid for all, not Medicare for all. It’s not a political slogan you hear much these days, but Walsh, the president and CEO of Boston Medical Center, has a unique perspective since so many of her hospital’s patients are on Medicaid. “I actually think Medicaid is the most important insurance plan in the country,” she said, noting that it covers roughly 79 million mostl...

When the year started, with Beacon Hill poised to make another go at a bill revamping the state’s education funding formula, some advocates were focused on boosting funding for schools, while others were insisting that new money come with new ways of holding districts accountable for how it’s spent and for closing the yawning achievement gaps that characterize the state’s K-12 landscape. The fact...

Rick Lord has a unique perspective on health care in Massachusetts. He serves on the state’s Health Policy Commission. He stepped down in May after more than 28 years as head of the business group Associated Industries of Massachusetts. And previously he served as the budget director of the House Ways and Means Committee on Beacon Hill. Lord talked health care on this week’s Health and Consequence...

The band of right-wing provocateurs who staged a "straight pride" parade in Boston 10 days ago were hoping to stir the pot. But they likely never imagined that the tempest they'd cause would be a judicial showdown among local officials that exposes tensions set off by last year's election of a reform-minded district attorney. Things got unruly in the streets as the straight pride marchers were met...

The service disruptions caused by the MBTA’s more aggressive maintenance schedule could provide a catalyst for better bus service, according to some of the chief proponents of bus rapid transit. More common in other countries than the United States, bus rapid transit, or BRT, is a strategy that uses buses so they mimic the conveniences of a rail line. That should include a dedicated right-of-way i...

When two aides to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh were convicted earlier this month on federal charges of conspiring to extort organizers of the Boston Calling music festival in 2014, US Attorney Andrew Lelling touted it as another victory for efforts to root out corruption in government. But a lot of people don’t see it that way. The case has generated a tremendous amount of blowback from advocates, lab...

Cara Solomon and George Powell think personal stories – gathering them and reading them – are the way to bridge differences and build a stronger sense of community in Boston. Solomon is the founder and Powell is one of the most successful story ambassadors at Everyday Boston, a nonprofit organization that is attempting to knit together Boston one person’s story at a time. Solomon and Powell are ab...

Most of the focus so far in the scandal at the Registry of Motor Vehicles has been on finding out what went wrong. Now attention is starting to shift to why. On the Codcast, Sen. Eric Lesser of Longmeadow and Paul Levy, one of the state’s most experienced managers, discussed why an agency would ignore all the warning signs and allow notices about Massachusetts driver violations in other states to...

Alex Morse, the 30-year-old mayor of Holyoke, may look like he’s on a fool’s errand by challenging Rep. Richard Neal in next year’s Democratic primary. After all, just seven months ago Neal’s three decades of toil in the DC vineyards landed him in one of the most powerful positions in the House, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. But Morse says the veteran Springfield pol is out...

It's humane. It’s a violation of international law. It’s not the way things have worked since the mid-1960s. These were the arguments of immigration advocates following last week’s announcement by the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice that rules for claiming asylum in the US would be changing. Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clini...