The House Health Care Committee voted down a budget bill on Friday that would have addressed low-income health insurance subsidies and a range of taxes.
The 5-5 vote, which resulted in the death of the committee’s bill, was split between solid Democratic support for the legislation and opposition from three Republicans, one independent and one Progressive. Democratic Rep. George Till, who is the only physician on the committee, abruptly left the committee to deal with an emergency, his fellow legislators said, right before the vote transpired. He would have broken the tie.
Democratic Rep. Mike Fisher, who chairs the committee, doesn’t see a future for the legislation and the measures it included.
“The bill is dead,” Fisher said. “I have no plans to bring up the bill again … I think right now everything is dead.”
The mainstays of the bill were three-fold. It called for low-income subsidies, which would have provided significantly less health insurance coverage than what is provided by current programs for Vermonters earning $15,300 to $34,500 annually. It would have created a penny per ounce excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. And it would have repealed an employer assessment used for funding current subsidy programs (Click here and head to the bottom of this story for more on that assessment).
While the committee’s three Republican members felt the bill went too far, Progressive Rep. Chris Pearson of Burlington and independent Rep. Paul Poirier of Barre didn’t think it went far enough.
The Republicans welcomed the repeal of the employer assessment, but they were staunchly against a sugar-sweetened beverage tax.
Fairfax Rep. John Mitchell, who owns a group of convenience stores, said the tax would hurt businesses.
“There’s no way I could be in favor of a regressive tax singling out an industry for the cause of obesity,” the Republican representative said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Poirier and Pearson voted against the bill for a different reason. They want to provide subsidies that maintain or come close to maintaining health insurance levels for Vermonters currently enrolled in the Catamount and VHAP programs. Those health insurance programs will end in 2014, when the state’s new health benefit exchange, or insurance marketplace, takes effect.
Pearson has repeatedly said that leaving lower income Vermonters with less coverage could jeopardize the state’s ability to implement a universal health care system in 2017, when Vermont would be eligible for a federal waiver to deviate from the Affordable Care Act.
“I’ve said from day one that I want to do more to insulate people shifting from Catamount or VHAP into the exchange,” Pearson said. “We came back with more and more modest proposals. There wasn’t the desire to (provide higher subsidies) even though we included new sources of revenue that would have alleviated pressure on the budget. It seemed really shortsighted to me.”
Peter Sterling, director of the Vermont Campaign for Health Care Security, said the independent and Progressive are looking out for interest of lower income Vermonters.
“All of the testimony proves that this proposal will increase either premiums, out-of-pocket costs, or both for 30,000 low and middle-income Vermonters,” he said. “I think the House Health Care Committee should look at increasing the subsidy to make sure that more people have access to affordable health care.”
The majority of the committee voted for the subsidy levels of support in the bill on Tuesday. The sugar-sweetened beverage tax was included in the bill after a 7-2 committee vote for the measure.
Fisher says now that the bill is dead, the committee won’t make any recommendations for or against a low-income subsidy, sugar-sweetened beverage tax or employer assessment. But Pearson says the committee still has work to do.
“I don’t think this is dead yet,” Pearson said. “We are going to fund the exchange. I’m pretty sure House Health Care will continue to be involved. We’ll see what happens next week.”
Updated at 5:21 p.m. on Feb. 22, 2013.
At 11:20 p.m., a correction was made to reflect that Mike Fisher’s vote on Tuesday on subsidy levels did not break a tie; the committee chair votes the same as every other member.
