Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Jeff Wennberg, executive director of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom.
After two years of stalling and misdirection the Shumlin Administration has finally asked the $3 billion question: How will Vermont pay for Governor Shumlin’s government monopoly single payer health care plan? While this should have been the first question asked and answered before the legislature enacted the single payer law, the timing of the question guarantees that voters will remain in the dark when they go to the polls in November.
Indeed, the timing ensures that we are at least 18 months away from knowing with certainty where Vermont will find the $3 billion necessary to replace private health insurance with publicly funded single payer. According to the Rutland Herald, Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding stated that while the Administration will meet next January’s statutory deadline to deliver a financing plan to the legislature, no action on the proposal will be sought in 2013. He cited the federal requirement that single payer wait until 2017 as the reason for the delay.
This statement, however, appears to conflict with a contract Secretary Spaulding signed with the University of Massachusetts Medical School to produce the financing plan, and recent comments by Governor Shumlin himself. The contract will pay UMass $300,000 to “assist the State with completing two financing plans to be submitted to the legislature no later than January 15, 2013.” But the plans are to include “A model in which the state introduces public financing for all coverage that is not federally-financed, beginning in 2015.” The contract scope of work contains no mention of a model that starts in 2017.
The day after the Rutland Herald story ran, Governor Shumlin was interviewed on Vermont Public Radio where he emphatically stated he wanted to see single payer enacted by 2016, and sooner if possible. When asked if a federal waiver would be required to start before 2017 he said, “We’ll see . . . there’s gotta be a Vermont way to find a way around those obstacles. We can outsmart the feds.”
It appears the governor has a plan to implement single payer starting in 2015 without the benefit of a federal waiver. But his administration is advising the legislature to take no action on how to pay the $3 billion price tag until 2014 at the earliest. Meanwhile his administration has expended or applied for $120 million in federal grants to hire staff, consultants and computer systems to implement the plan and the legislature has been dutifully enacting laws that dismantle the private health insurance market in anticipation of the state assuming control.
The strategy is clear: implement single payer without telling Vermonters about the massive tax increases needed to pay for it so that by the time we finally see the bill no other options will be available. This is not responsible governance. This is not how sound public policy is developed.
Shumlin is confident he can “outsmart the feds.” He appears equally confident he can outsmart the rest of us. It is up to Vermonters to prove him wrong – or right.
