Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]he best story after the game is in the loser’s locker room, and the best way to judge a politician – his character as well as his ability – is by seeing whether he knows how to lose.
Gov. Peter Shumlin just passed that test.
In announcing the abandonment of his cherished universal health care plan – “the greatest disappointment of my political life, so far” – Shumlin was appropriately subdued, and quite likely humiliated.
But he was there.
He did not send out any of the several (too many?) appointees who had been trying to cobble together his single payer health dream since he was first elected in 2010.
He faced both the music and the reporters himself for more than an hour. He read a clear, detailed, candid and not-very-self-serving (as these things go) explanation of why he had to pull the plug on a proposal that obviously meant a great deal to him, personally as well as politically.
Then he stood there and answered questions, perhaps not happily, but politely, proving that he could face not only cameras and scribblers (not, really, that scary a bunch) but reality. No matter how much his health care plan meant to him – and remember, his support for it goes way back before he ran for governor – the numbers told him that it just wouldn’t work – not financially, and, therefore, not politically, either.
Before awarding the governor too many merit badges, it’s worth remembering that he and what he likes to call his “team” most likely knew several weeks ago that these numbers would not add up. Or, perhaps more accurately, that they did add up, but added up too high.
So he could have made this announcement before the election that he barely won, not six weeks after it.
That might have been admirable. It also would have been unprecedented. The last time an elected official volunteered humiliating information just before an election was … well, never.
Just as the corporate executive tries not to reveal embarrassing news just before the annual meeting.
Still, making the announcement now did give Shumlin’s opponents reason to gloat, no one with more justification than Scott Milne, the Republican opponent who came within 2,400 votes of defeating the governor last month.
Before the election, Milne said Shumlin’s single-payer plan was “dead,” adding, “I’ll tell you now. He’ll tell you later.”
And so he did.
Forthright as the governor’s concession was, Republicans did not appear ready to let him off the hook. House Republican minority leader Rep. Don Turner of Milton called Shumlin’s four-year effort to create a universal health care plan an “ideological experiment (which) was an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars.”
It was an expensive ideological experiment, and it was always difficult to see how it could succeed in one small state. Clearly, the country as a whole could adopt a universal, government-coordinated health care system. It’s what almost every other prosperous, first-world democracy has, even if some of them are technically not “single payer.”
But in this country, no state is truly sovereign. It does not have its own currency. It is economically linked to the rest of the country. Some Vermonters work in other states. Synchronizing a health care system so different from the one used in the other 49 states was always going to be a challenge.
Especially, perhaps, because the country as a whole has a new health care system – the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” – and it is working. It is not working perfectly. Nothing does. But the percentage of uninsured Americans has declined, more insurance companies are competing for customers in many states, and health care costs are rising at the lowest rate in decades. Trying to create a new system in Vermont while the rest of the country is still adjusting to a new system in all 50 states is a tall order.
But Shumlin apparently never considered dropping his single-payer vision after the Affordable Care Act was passed. Part of his determination (stubbornness?) was quite likely political. No doubt somewhere in his day (or night) dreams was the vision that if he could successfully create a single payer health care plan for Vermont, he would become a hero to advocates all over the country.
And who knew what could flow from that?
But he was also a true believer, convinced, as he said again Wednesday, that the present health care system “is broken,” and that relying on businesses to provide health care for their employees was inefficient and bad for business.
He is hardly alone in either of those judgments. The United States pays far more for health care than any other advanced nation. And even the staunchly conservative late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that health care was a responsibility of government, not private businesses.
In the end, though, the cost of his single payer plan would have been too much for Vermont to tolerate, a reality he accepted. It may be true, as Shumlin said, that Vermonters are already paying as much for health care as they would pay for single payer. But they are paying less of it in taxes, and the taxes they would have to pay to finance single payer were too much, too soon.
Politically, Shumlin is likely to gain from his loss. The Republicans may continue to assail him over all the wasted time and money. But the more common reactions from businesses and politicians was one of relief, and of at least grudging praise that he pulled the plug when he did.
For Democrats in the Legislature, there was obviously some relief. They already face a full menu of a $100 million budget gap and voter anger about property taxes. Now at least they don’t also have to try to shoehorn a complex health care revolution into the five months of the session that begins in January.
But Speaker Shap Smith said health care remains a problem, one that affects other budgets, including schools and municipalities, all of which have to help pay for their employees’ health care.
Most Vermonters, he said, probably pay more for health care than for public education, but the costs – divided among taxes, insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments – are less transparent.
“The underlying problem doesn’t go away,” Smith said. “We’re going to have to deal with the cost of health care in a different way.”
In other words, health care is likely to be on the legislative agenda this coming session, after all, if perhaps less visibly and less contentiously.
Some politicians – like some business leaders, academics and (come to think of it) journalists – get so wedded to some ideas – especially their very own – that they refuse to give up on them, no matter what.
On Wednesday, Peter Shumlin accepted reality, perhaps a bit later than he should have, but before mulish persistence might have led to catastrophe.
And he did it by himself, for all the world to see.
