Yesterday’s Burlington Free Press editorial says, “First get Vermont Health Connect right.”
Editorial Page Editor Aki Soga is right that the “relaunch of the Vermont Health Connect online insurance exchange is a crucial test for Gov. Shumlin’s efforts to bring a single-payer health care system to Vermont.”
It is a crucial system test but not the right test.
Let’s recall how we got here.
• 1994: Then-Gov. Howard Dean tried unsuccessfully to institute a single-payer system with then-Sen Peter Shumlin’s support.
• 2009: “If you like your plan you can keep…” Uh huh.
• 2010: Candidate Shumlin outlined his plans for a single payer health care system in 2010.
• 2012: Gov. Shumlin hired CGI Group (the same Canadian ne-er-do-well company that crafted the extraordinary healthcare.gov debacle) to do it on a smaller scale in Vermont. Vermont paid CGI about $67 million.
• 2014: Gov. Shumlin rehired Obamacare architect Jonathan (“stupidity of the American voter”) Gruber for an extra $400,000 in July to study how Vermont could squeeze an extra $2 billion out of taxpayers to fund the statewide single-payer health-care system. (Mr. Gruber also drafted much of the original single-payer system proposal in 2010.) Sadly, Mr. Gruber has never known when to shut up.
• 2014: Gov. Shumlin hired some third graders who failed arithmetic to run Health Connect billing.
I haven’t had insurance under Health Connect/Obamacare for many months. I think the third graders have stopped billing me for it although the arrearage they “calculated” for insurance I haven’t had was in the thousands of dollars.
That could have been the chosen Gruber method: bill people who don’t even have coverage for insurance premiums they don’t owe. It will take only 333,333 Vermonters paying in an average of $6,000 to come up with that $2 billion.
It is a crucial system test but not the right test.
The right test answers these three simple questions:
Does the system cover me?
Does the system improve medical results?
Does the system reduce health care costs?
That’s a system that Vermont’s liberal economists are incapable of planning (“all we need is to find $2 billion in new ‘revenue'”) and Vermont’s liberal politicians are incapable of implementing (“all we need is to find $2 billion in new ‘revenue'”).
It’s too bad Vermonters have to suffer through Grubergate with the rest of the nation, but when Vermont’s political left wants to sleep with the big dogs, they are bound to get fleas.
Vermont voters elected those libruls, did they not? Majority did, anyway.
Probably time for the ones who didn’t elect them to leave Vermont. Libruls seem more than ever devoted to NOT thinking. I have little hope for their redemption.
Understand that the Vermont voters and the libruls they elected all moved to the state within our lifetime. They don’t represent the historical Vermont values.
It is worse than sad that the descendents of the people who struggled to build the state are overrun by unthinking interlopers. It is worse than sad that the descendents of the people who struggled to build the state are the ones you think should move.
Maybe I have my New England States mixed up because I only have a semester and a half of college, but does anything interesting ever happen in Vermont besides making diagonal slashes on maple trees to collect sap?
— George
Why, yes, George.
Palette, and the World’s Mostest Civil Unions.
We went after Guinness records for the World’s Largest Snowman, the World’s Largest Ice Cream Sundae, the World’s Largest pancake (flipped by helicopter), the World’s Largest Artists’
I remember reading about the Largest Artists’ Pallete in the CenTex Mall Pennysaver. Tell me, how large was that Artist? I always wondered about that.
— George
Gov. Shumlin (D-VT) says it’s too late to replace state consultant Jonathan Gruber, who was hired to run economic models to support Shumlin’s health care plans.
“I am caught between a rock and a hard place,” Shumlin said. “I have a man who’s made comments about all of us, the American public, that I find reprehensible and outright shocking.”
On the other hand, “We do need his work in order to present a plan to the Legislature in January.”
Uh huh.