Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Vermont’
December 18th, 2014 at 11:06 am
Citing Costs, Vermont Shelves Single Payer Health System

Vermont will not push forward with its plan to launch a state-based single payer health care system in 2017, reports the Daily Caller.

Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin made the announcement on Wednesday, citing several factors.

Among the most important were changes in financing assumptions. Vermont had been counting on infusions of federal funding to buoy the program, but confirmed that it overshot its estimates by a whopping $311 million. Without the expected seed money of federal tax dollars there’s not enough start-up capital needed to get the project going.

The other blow to Vermont’s single payer scheme – to be called Green Mountain Care – is its lack of financial sustainability. In order to make the enterprise successful, Vermont would need to levy tax hikes like an 11.5 percent payroll tax and an income tax up to 9.5 percent. Those changes would likely kill business development in the state, eroding the tax base necessary to pay for Green Mountain Care.

Though the time, money and effort poured into this failed experiment have been costly, it will hopefully serve as a reality check for government officials to abandon the impossible and instead focus on implementing tangible policies that can improve lives now.

August 6th, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Vermont Latest to Fire ObamaCare Website Maker

After nearly a year of failed attempts, Vermont is firing CGI Federal – the company that bungled both the federal healthcare.gov and Massachusetts’ online insurance exchange – as its web designer.

“With Vermont still lacking a fully functioning health website more than 10 months after its glitch-plagued debut last October, Vermont officials said late Monday that they were pulling the plug on CGI’s CGI Technologies and Solutions’ contract,” reports Newsweek.

The decision will cost CGI almost $20 million, but at least Vermont has agreed not to sue the company for damages.

Vermont’s announcement follows several other states that have abandoned their original – and very expensive – ObamaCare websites. Some, like Nevada, Hawaii, and Oregon, are planning to cut their losses and transition to the federal healthcare.gov website. Others, like Massachusetts, Maryland, and now Vermont, are switching to new contractors hoping to recoup at least some of their investments.

Of course, there are success stories. State exchanges in Kentucky and Connecticut are routinely cited as well-functioning websites – though even these have glitches. However, the prevalence of so many high-profile failures indicates that this massive experiment in public-private partnerships has resulted in a huge transfer of wealth with precious little to show for it.

January 8th, 2014 at 3:20 pm
Vermont Wants 49 Other States to Fund Its State-Run Single-Payer System

Vermont is ready to start the first state-run single-payer system in the United States. There’s just one hitch: It needs federal taxpayers to foot the bill.

A state law passed in 2011 intends to create a state-run entity that “would largely sideline the insurance industry, and instead set up a government-managed system to collect all health care fees and pay out all health care costs,” reports Fox News.

But apparently, a program whose supporters estimate will save Vermont citizens a total of $1.9 billion from 2017-19 isn’t financially viable unless taxpayers living in the other 49 states chip in.

“In order for Green Mountain Care to fully launch in 2017, the health care exchange would have to get approval from the federal government to use federal money to fund the state program,” says the report.

It’s not clear from the article whether the federal money needed comes from Obamacare insurance subsidies or Medicaid (probably the former), but either way people living outside Vermont must fund a program that won’t benefit them, so that Green Mountain residents can live in a liberal utopia.

Simply put, if a majority of Vermont voters want to have a state-run single-payer system, they should raise their own taxes to the level necessary to pay for it.

August 16th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
ObamaCare’s Voter Registration Ploy Will Spawn Lawsuits

Democratic strongholds like California, Vermont and New York have been quick to use ObamaCare’s state-based insurance exchanges as an excuse to register voters.

State officials are claiming that 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka the “Motor Voter Act”) requires combining election prospects with health insurance, but the reality is much murkier.

To start, ObamaCare is silent on voter registration. “The health care law spans 974 pages and regulates nearly one-fifth of our economy,” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) wrote in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, “yet nowhere in the law is voter registration mentioned.”

Then there’s the Motor Voter Act itself.

As written, the law “requires states to offer voter registration at government offices, most commonly departments of motor vehicles,” explains the Detroit Free Press. “With the exchanges, which are in some ways a new kind of government office, some are questioning whether the law applies to them.”

But unlike a state’s motor vehicles department, not all ObamaCare exchanges are standard government agencies. The paper continues, “In some states, the exchange will be a nonprofit; in others it will be part of the state’s health or human services agency. And in many Republican-controlled states, the federal government will operate the exchanges.”

The lack of uniformity is already leading to differing interpretations about whether the Motor Voter Act applies, which in turn is spawning lawsuits.

With this much uncertainty leading to costly court battles, states and their taxpayers would be much better served leaving the question whether Motor Voter applies to ObamaCare for academics to debate.

The alternative is an expensive and unnecessary distraction.