As the Trump administration rolls back access to vaccines and continues cutting the public health infrastructure, Massachusetts is taking steps to ensure continued vaccine availability for residents. Just last week, the state of Florida announced that it was going to end all vaccine mandates. Reporter Chris Lisinski with the State House News Service says that is not the plan here in Massachusetts.
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: Yeah, that's about as sharp a contrast for Massachusetts as you could get.
Instead, what's happening here is [that] Governor Maura Healey's administration, through the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), and the Division of Insurance, is effectively giving the DPH commissioner unilateral authority to make vaccine recommendations and not to link those to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, amid concerns that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy and President Trump are elevating vaccine skeptics and anti-science viewpoints that could imperil the viability of access to vaccines.
So, this is new authority given at the state level to chart a path on vaccine access and use, and a new requirement for insurers here in Massachusetts to cover those vaccines.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Have Massachusetts Republicans taken a stand on vaccine access? What's the mass GOP saying?
No. Republicans here have been basically silent on this topic. It appears that they're really trying not to get involved at this point. Caught in between a state population that is largely very pro vaccine, very in favor of the way things have been running here, and Republicans nationally who align much more with Trump and Secretary Kennedy.
This is just one of many rollbacks and cuts from the White House that Massachusetts leaders say they won't go along with. Massachusetts Governor Healey has taken legal action to reverse environmental and workplace regulation changes. She's drawn attention to funding threats. She's lobbied against federal rollbacks. Chris, remembering that not all costs are monetary, sometimes it ends up being structural — like straining the Medicaid system — What are some of the challenges that state legislators might need to sort out when they come back from their summer break?
I think the primary one is what you just mentioned with Medicaid. We know we're getting more and more estimates, virtually every week at this point, how significant the cuts to Medicaid will be in Massachusetts. And that's something that state lawmakers are probably going to have to deal with at some point in the very near future. Granted, some of these cuts will take a little bit of time to take effect, but it's going to be a pretty sizable disruption to patients and also a pretty big hit to state budgeting.
Switching topics here: Last week, state gambling regulators were briefed on a long-time unauthorized betting scheme involving a Philippines basketball league. In the three years since the state legislature legalized sports wagering, the Mass Gaming Commission has penalized all the state's sports books for taking bets on games that were not legally permitted. So, what should we know about this latest instance?
Yeah, this one was quite a doozy of a story. Apparently for more than two years, sports betting companies have allowed people here in Massachusetts to wager on professional basketball games in the Philippines in a league that is facing allegations of game fixing. This one was quite an eyebrow raising headline.
What's the backstory here? Why do regulators say certain contests like this Philippines hoops League and others get excluded from legal betting in Massachusetts?
Yeah, the commission explicitly prohibits betting on any sports or sporting event overseen by Russian or Belarusian governing bodies. So, that that's part of it here as well. And there's also, you know, some pretty extensive material out there in the public sphere about game fixing involved in this league. The Department of Justice in the Philippines reportedly found probable cause to charge some folks a few years ago. So, with all of that information in place, the Mass. Gaming Commission here has just said ‘absolutely not. Don't even touch this.’
