Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin nimbly defended his economic policies, education initiatives and his ambitious single payer health care reform plan in a debate with three challengers at a WDEV debate at the Tunbridge World’s Fair on Saturday.
The governor expounded on his record of balancing state budgets without raising income, sales and rooms and meals taxes.
Exchanges over health care and the economy defined the debate between Shumlin and his three opponents, all of whom sought votes in the Republican primary: Scott Milne, a Republican, Dan Feliciano, a Libertarian candidate, and Emily Peyton, an independent.
Mark Johnson hosted the debate in a gazebo at the fairgrounds in front of an audience of about 80 onlookers.
While the exchanges were civil, Milne immediately went on the attack. Out of the gate, he assailed the governor for his administration’s failed rollout of Vermont Health Connect, the state’s health care exchange website, and he described Shumlin as the “most radical progressive governor in the country with his health care proposal and some of the other things he’s doing.”
“Vermonters are sick and tired of having a state government and a governor who flies around the country who comes up with a new idea and talks the Legislature into forcing it upon us. Those days are over,” Milne said.
Milne, however, did not offer an alternative health care reform proposal, nor did he openly oppose the governor’s single payer health care plan. Over the course of the debate, his discourse devolved into anecdotes or jabs instead of answers to Johnson’s questions. Milne made a reference to capping the statewide property tax for two years until his administration can come up with an alternative approach to funding education, but he did not elaborate on details about the proposal.
Shumlin responded by poking holes in Milne’s arguments. “Scott Milne, as you just heard, has absolutely no plan, he just outlined no plan to ensure that young Vermonters can stay here and work here,” Shumlin said. “He has no plan on health care. He’s only willing to criticize the hard work that we’ve been doing. Being governor is about leadership, the way we will keep young people in Vermont and have more come back in the future is by doing the things that ensure that we continue to have a growing economy.”
Feliciano described Vermont Health Connect as “a disaster,” and he opposes the governor’s single payer initiative. His primary interest, however, is in cutting state spending, especially in the Agency of Human Services, which has increased by more than 5 percent a year on average during Shumlin’s tenure in office.
Johnson directed the first question to Shumlin: “Can you really say that a majority of Vermonters are better off today than they were four years ago?”
Shumlin told the crowd and the radio audience that “you can’t argue with the facts, the facts are that Vermonters enjoy one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.” He went on to say his administration has created 9,200 new jobs and Vermont has the fastest economic growth rate in the second quarter of 2014 and the second highest income growth in the country.
The governor, however, quickly switched tack and said “none of that matters, if you are a middle class Vermonter who’s working one or two jobs and still not seeing your income change.” He said it’s critical for the state to invest in early childhood education, higher education and workforce retraining to boost prospects for families.
“We’ve made real progress, we’re on the right track, but we have a lot more work to do and that’s why I hope you’ll give me two more years to continue the work that we’re doing,” Shumlin said.
Feliciano, who garnered nearly 15 percent of Republican votes in a primary write-in campaign, has extensive experience as an IT and budget manager for the military and large corporations, including Cigna and Travelers Insurance. He believes the state can cut spending, create more efficiencies within government and improve services. Rising state budgets are putting too large a burden on Vermonters, he said.
His answers to questions about health care and how to tackle child abuse in Vermont both revolved around budget savings for the state. Feliciano says that the state should open up the marketplace to more insurers “by reducing a lot of the regulations that are in place that are constraining the single payer system.” He also said the state needs to look for savings in delivery to care for people with chronic diseases because he says 75 percent of health care spending is on this group of patients.
Instead of pursuing single payer, Feliciano says the state should forgo federal subsidies and move to the federal health exchange.
Shumlin staunchly defended his single payer initiative. He touts the plan as a way to bolster the state’s economy. “In my view, the biggest obstacle to job growth and to income growth is the rising cost of health care that rises faster than our incomes.”
His plan, he says, will give Vermonters universal access to health care “because you’re a Vermonter, not because of where you work or because of how healthy you might be.”
The single payer system will shift the health care delivery model, he said, from “a quantity based reimbursement system to one that is based on outcomes.”
“Right now we pay 20 cents of every dollar on health care,” Shumlin said. “If you make a buck in Vermont, 20 cents goes to health care. It will be 40 cents if health care grows in the next 10 years at the same rate it did for the past 10 years. We’ve got to fix that.”
Milne used single payer as an example of how the Shumlin administration has mismanaged tax dollars. He accused the governor of “flushing $100 million down the toilet on this single payer health care experiment with no tangible benefit yet to Vermonters.”
Johnson asked why the governor wouldn’t release the financing plan for single payer before the election. The Legislature originally asked the Shumlin administration to deliver a plan in 2013 for funding the initiative. The governor’s office missed legislative deadlines in 2013 and 2014.
The new health care system is likely to be funded with income, and or payroll taxes, but the governor carefully avoided the word “tax” in his response, and he insisted that his team needed to get the plan right before it is released to the public.
“There is no state in the country that has moved from a premium-based system to one that is based upon raising money, based upon ability to pay,” Shumlin said. “My plan is going to be based on ability to pay. If we’ve learned anything from the Affordable Care Act and what they sent to us from DC, it’s this: Don’t go out with a plan until it’s ready. Designing a system that moves from premiums to ability to pay is both complicated and you have to get it right because health care has a huge impact on the economy.”
