The Codcast

Biden's lead has supporters....nervous by CommonWealth Beacon

Evan Falchuk, in favor of Question 2 calling for ranked choice voting, squares off with Nick Murray, a policy analyst at the Maine Policy Institute.

We talk to David Seltz, the executive director of the state’s Health Policy Commission, about how the coronavirus is changing health care.

We talk with Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell about her candidacy for mayor.

Michelle Wu is, by conventional standards, an unlikely figure to be challenging a sitting Boston mayor (though incumbent Mayor Marty Walsh has yet to declare his candidacy, he is widely expected to seek a third term next year). She is shy by temperament, and when she entered Harvard as an undergraduate in 2004, politics was so removed from Wu’s upbringing that she considered herself neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

But our conversation with Wu on The Codcast, focused more on getting to know her than on details of campaign policy points, reveals how various strands of her family history, childhood, and college years, even if removed from formal involvement in politics, connect in ways that make a future in public service not that unlikely after all.

Massachusetts voters will be asked in November whether to update the Right to Repair law -- but they may have a hard time wading through the complexities of a ballot question when supporters and opponents cannot even agree on the basics of what it will do.

Tommy Hickey, director of the Right to Repair Coalition, and Conor Yunits, a spokesman for No on One, joined the Codcast to discuss the ballot question – and disagreed on even the most factual details of what the current law says and how the ballot question would change it.

Today, cars are equipped with a port where a mechanic can plug in and diagnose a problem. The ballot question would require manufacturers to create a new open access data platform where consumers, and their repair shops, could use a mobile app to access telematic data, which is information transmitted wirelessly.

I took a Red Line train last week that was crowded according to the MBTA’s COVID-19 crowding standards, but the consensus on this week’s Codcast was that I didn’t need to worry.

Jim Aloisi, the former secretary of transportation and TransitMatters board member, called my story on the crowded train ride a mild over-reaction “Your article might have given people an impression that they should be fearful of a situation that I don’t think is any more or less risky than any of the other activities that people do normally all the time,” he said.

With less than two weeks until school starts, parents from Somerville and Newton say they have yet to get any details on what classes will look like for their children and whether remote learning will be better than it was when schools suddenly shut down last spring amid COVID-19.

“Families cannot live in a state of uncertainty,” said Keri Rodrigues of Somerville on The Codcast. “I am two weeks away from the first day of school in Somerville. I still don’t have a specific hour-by-hour schedule of what remote learning is going to look like, when my child is expected to be on Zoom. I don’t even know who my kids’ teachers are going to be and frankly they don’t know my kids either. I just spent six months with my children. I have a lot of information I’d like to tell their teachers about who they are, how they learn, and what they’re capable of. And there has not been any communication with me and … what this is going to look like when it gets down to brass tacks.”

Jack Cheng of Newton says he and his two teenagers are also in the dark. “They don’t know what school is going to be like and they’re frustrated,” he said.

The federal government allows states to recoup Medicaid costs after the deaths of patients who use the program. Estate recovery allows homes to be seized and sold to pay off expended Medicaid dollars, a move advocates decry as penalizing low-income families, and making Medicaid into a loan program.

Some states take the federal rules a step further. “MassHealth has some of the strongest and most draconian state recovery rules in the country,” Somerville Rep. Christine Barber said on a new “Health or Consequences” episode of The Codcast with John McDonough of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Dr. Paul Hattis, who recently retired from Tufts University School of Medicine.

Markey-Kennedy race in the homestretch by CommonWealth Beacon