MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Former Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, who pushed for the creation of a single payer health care system in Vermont, says he doesn’t think small states can do it alone.
Shumlin, a Democrat, spoke at the Harvard School of Public Health in Massachusetts on Tuesday.
Then-Gov. Shumlin announced just before the 2014 election that he was abandoning efforts to implement a government-financed health care system, Vermont Public Radio reported (https://bit.ly/2xnYxeV ).
“The lesson is - I was wrong,” Shumlin said Tuesday. “I don’t think small states can go it alone, at least little states like Vermont with an unstable federal partnership.”
Under Shumlin’s plan, employers and employees would have paid for health care mainly by using a new payroll tax.
Shumlin said Tuesday that there was no guarantee tax rates wouldn’t go up substantially if health costs continued to rise.
“It’s very tough to make the sale to legislators and to constituents: ’Hey, this is a great thing. You’re finally going to have health care as a right and not a privilege,’” he said. “’But you’re going to have tax rates that are quite high replacing premiums, so it’s not money you’re not spending now, but there’s winners and losers.’ So that was the biggest problem - money.”
He said the clincher was the troubled rollout of the state’s health care exchange Vermont Health Connect, which had technical problems and cost overruns.
Progressive Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who was a state senator at the time, said Shumlin should have continued to pursue the plan.
“I still believe the majority of Vermonters want a wholesale fix to the system and would like to have seen us move forward,” he said.
Legislation has been proposed in the Vermont Senate that would set up a study of a universal primary care system. It has 13 co-sponsors and is expected to be a priority for the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare next year.
___
Information from: WVPS-FM, https://www.vpr.net
Please read our comment policy before commenting.