September 18, 2017

State run single payer crashes in Vermont

Politico - Vermont was supposed to be the beacon for a single-payer health care system in America. But now its plans are in ruins, and its onetime champion Gov. Peter Shumlin may have set back the cause.

Advocates of a “Medicare for all” approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn’t even include a weaker “public option” government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones.

So single-payer advocates looked instead to make a breakthrough in the states. Bills have been introduced from Hawaii to New York; former Medicare chief Don Berwick made it a key plank of his unsuccessful primary race for Massachusetts governor.

Vermont under Shumlin became the most visible trailblazer. Until Wednesday, when the governor admitted what critics had said all along: He couldn’t pay for it.

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2 comments:

Tom Puckett said...

Yes, maybe in a given state, but nationally paying for everyone's health care costs from a pool that already exists would be a drop in its bucket.

The Pentagon itself estimates that ** trillions ** have gone missing, if only through accounting mistakes.

Every Federal agency may have similar accounting problems.

Find some of that money, or pull enought of it back from whatever off-books projects are going on and take care of our roads, water and people first! Then play with your erector sets.

Just a humble, respectful suggestion...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-accounting-errors/index.html

Cheers, Tom

KZeese said...

The corporate mouthpiece, Politico, is putting out false information. No state has even considered single payer. These are all multi-payer bills. We warned calling these bills single payer would come back and bite the movement.

Single payer advocates always said it was false to label Vermont (and other states) as "single payer" -- they were not. They are all multi-payer plans that seek universal healthcare coverage.

Multi-payer systems are not affordable (as we are seeing with national healthcare where the US pays about twice as much per capita than single payer systems around the word).

A state cannot put in place a true single payer program because there are a half dozen federal laws that prevent a state from doing so.

It is absurd to think that the most expensive healthcare system in the world -- the US system which is about twice as expensive per capita than other health systems -- cannot afford a more efficient single payer. This is one of the great lies of healthcare profiteers, especially the insurance industry whose administration is one-third the cost of healthcare. Getting rid of the immense profit making and unnecessary insurance system saves money, controlling the cost of pharmaceuticals which are at least twice as expensive in the US than in single payer systems, obviously saves money.

The only way to undermine single payer is to call multi-payer systems (like Vermont) single payer!