Michael Dukakis on ACOs: “We tried that, folks. It didn’t work.”

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

The creation of accountable care organizations or a global payment structure won’t fix the health care system in Massachusetts and make it more affordable, former governor Michael Dukakis told an audience at Harvard last week.

Speaking during the Harvard School of Public Health Voices from the Field series, Dukakis said urging the health care market to fix itself is “a colossal waste of time.”

“If the market doesn’t work you have to regulate,” he said. “R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E. Thoughtfully, responsibly, and with the active involvement of all of the people who provide health care and who are very important to us.”

Dukakis said Governor Deval Patrick today has all of the authority he needs to regulate the health care market. He cautioned that if Patrick submits a bill asking for regulatory power “it might come back with half of his authority stripped from him.”

Here’s an excerpt from the event. See the video above more of Dukakis’s comments, including harsh words for Mitt Romney, his thoughts on what role preventive care should have in the national conversation about health care, and the intersection of public policy and politics:

If we paid a little attention, it might be a good idea, to the experience of other countries around the world who are doing this and who, for some reason, seem to be able to provide rather good health care to their people at half the cost we do -- whatever the siltstone, whether it’s Australian medicare or a multi-payer system in Germany or an essentially privatized system in Switzerland -- every one of them regulates cost, without exception.