Vermont’s Legislature should release financing information on the newly-passed Green Mountain Care program before the 2012 elections, says Pat Crocker of the Green Mountain Patriots, a Burlington-based Tea Party group.
Girded with figures from Rutland’s city treasurer showing a $475 million deficit in the program’s first year and concerns over “the largest tax increase in the state of Vermont in our history,” Crocker urged 50 like-minded audience members at the Essex Grange Hall on Thursday to sign a petition for early release of funding blueprints for the state’s multi-billion dollar universal health care system.
Dr. William Hsiao, a consultant for the Legislature, has said the state would save $500 million in the first year of a single-payer system.
Citing a need for a “balanced perspective on health care reforms in Vermont,” Crocker hosted a town hall-style discussion with panelists critical of Act 48, the Green Mountain Care bill passed in May that lays a framework for single-payer health care in Vermont.
Panelists included John McClaughry, founder of free-market think tank the Ethan Allen Institute; Robert Maynard, an editor with True North Reports and program director at the Family Security Foundation; Robert Letovsky, a professor of business administration at St. Michael’s College and a former resident of Canada; and Wendy Wilton, treasurer for the city of Rutland.
McClaughry told the audience that universal health care advocates could be refuted on a number of grounds — for example, he said, “Health care is clearly not a human right.” A centralized “health czar” system, he said, trumps individuals’ ability to control their health care.
Green Mountain Care’s five-member board, tasked with incubating and managing the program, determines “what will be covered, who will get it, which people are covered for certain things and which people are not — the board is extremely powerful — and how much providers will be paid,” said McClaughry.
Maynard picked up the thread. Because Green Mountain Care’s board is largely autonomous, he said, “you are making a mockery of the whole democratic concept of accountability. This is a disaster on many levels.”
Contrasting “a system of voluntary association and exchange” with what he calls health care by bureaucratic decree, he said a free-market system of health care hasn’t been tried in a long time. “Government is a blunt instrument,” said Maynard, and using government to fix health care is like using “a hammer to fine-tune a circuit board.”
St. Mike’s professor Latovsky recounted his experiences with Canada’s health care system, which was created when he was in 9th grade. “The government [of Quebec, his home province] rations care by under-spending,” he said, leading to a shortage of doctors and an average 20-hour wait in emergency rooms. The U.S. health care system is excellent by comparison, he said, and implementing Green Mountain Care would result in a host of problems — from a loss of quality doctors to reinforcing the youth- flight problem that is already plaguing Vermont.
Rutland Treasurer Wilton’s number crunching seemed to garner the most attention. Wilton began to doubt the soundness of the finances behind the payroll-tax-funded system a few months ago, after she heard Vermont officials tout the benefits of Green Mountain Care at a luncheon she attended for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.
I believe that what we are probably looking at is the largest tax increase in the state of Vermont in our history, because that’s what it would require to fund this.”
– Wendy Wilton
Rutland City treasurer
Working with figures from the study conducted by Harvard economist Dr. Hsiao, Wilson came up with a projection model that challenges the numbers the Legislature used as it developed Act 48. In a best-case scenario, she argues, Green Mountain Care will run a $123 million dollar deficit in the first year, with significant deficits for the next four years.
A $475 million deficit is more likely, she says. “A lot of people are confused about Hsiao’s savings,” she told the audience. The 25 percent cost decrease that gets thrown around is only a reduction of the cost increase, she argued. Wilton predicts that an accurate figure for annual cost increases is 6.7 percent, based on figures from the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration.
She factors out 180,000 Vermonters from her revenue stream due to exemptions given to self-insuring employers, Medicare/Medicaid and military personnel. She also argues that Vermont won’t get necessary federal waivers right away, spurring her to further drop the projected savings.
Wilton says the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office reviewed and critiqued her projections. In an email she said that “What’s really been interesting to me is that I get confirmation frequently that my model is mostly correct. If my model were way off, there would have been a full-court press conference debunking my work. The state does not want this information out there — especially that an 11 percent payroll tax alone will not work.”
She expects BISHCA’s commissioner to propose tax hikes to the Legislature in 2013, when the Green Mountain Care board presents plans to implement the single-payer system.
“I believe that what we are probably looking at is the largest tax increase in the state of Vermont in our history, because that’s what it would require to fund this,” she told the audience at the Essex Grange.
The Green Mountain Patriots and supporters will go door-to-door in the near future with Wilton’s projections. An update is expected by September, including some improved numbers — but the conclusions are the same, said Wilton. A petition from Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, a 501(c)(4) managed by Darcie Johnston, asks the Legislature to release financing plans for Green Mountain Care by Sept. 15, 2012, rather than January 2013, to allow voters to weigh health care issues in the November elections.