Vermont's Single Payer Vision

Vermont's governor looks at ways to make his state's system the best in the nation:

MONTPELIER — The woman who Gov. Peter Shumlin hired to guide his health reform effort presented lawmakers Tuesday with the administration’s roadmap — an 80-page bill — leading to a consolidated, publicly financed system that would provide medical coverage to all Vermonters.

“We don’t think we have all the answers, but we think we are putting in front of you a solid proposal for moving forward with major, meaningful health reform,” Anya Rader Wallack, Shumlin’s special assistant on health reform, told members of House Health Care and Senate Health and Welfare committees. “We know you will find ways to change and improve it.”

Democratic legislative leaders embraced the bill as a framework they would use to speedily write their own version. House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morristown, wants the House Health Committee to vote out a bill by the second week in March.

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The bill would move the state through three stages in four years to reach the target of a single-payer system. Planning would dominate the first stage that would commence in July, with the first structural changes taking place in 2014.

A new, independent Vermont Health Reform Board proposed to begin work later this year would be charged with developing ways to contain health costs by reforming the way doctors and hospitals are paid and setting budgets for health expenditures.

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