When Anya Rader Wallack stepped down as chair of the Green Mountain Care Board in early August, she agreed to help the state reform its health care system as a consultant — not as a state employee.
Two weeks later, the details of that arrangement emerged. And both sides are poised to sign a contract by early September.
On Aug. 7, Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaudling approved Deputy Secretary Michael Clasen’s request to enter into a one-year, no-bid contract with Wallack for $100,000. The Vermont Press Bureau’s Peter Hirschfeld first spotlighted this development.
The contract will be with Wallack’s firm Arrowhead Health Analytics, LLC, and will pay $200 an hour for a maximum of 500 hours.
The salary for Wallack’s previous position as the chair of the Green Mountain Care Board is pegged in statute to that of a superior court judge. In fiscal year 2014, Wallack’s salary would have totaled $126,360, and she would have received $162,567 in compensation when benefits and contributions to Medicare and Social Security were factored in.
The state is now going to contract with Wallack to oversee the implementation of a $45 million “State Innovation Model” grant from the federal government. She will be chair of the so-called “Core Team” at the top of the health care grant’s government hierarchy. Other members of the eight-person Core Team include the new chair of the Green Mountain Care Board Al Gobeille, Commissioner of the Department of Vermont Health Access Mark Larson, and president of the Vermont Business Roundtable Lisa Ventriss.
The grant will be used to expand and integrate health information technology systems across the state to better share clinical information. Hospital IT infrastructure is disjointed, and this grant aims to smooth out the connections between providers. The grant funds will also be used to experiment with new payment models and build upon management models from Vermont’s Blueprint for Health initiative for chronic care.
While Wallack will oversee the grant, she will be paid out of General Fund dollars from the governor’s office.
Wallack comes to the position with years of experience in Vermont’s health arena. The native Vermonter was the senior health policy adviser and deputy chief of staff for the Dean administration. She was the lead architect behind Vermont’s recent health care reform bills and the creation of the Green Mountain Care Board, which is charged with controlling the state’s growing cost of health care. As chair of the board, she was the driving force behind the state’s SIM grant application.
Clasen defended the administration’s decision to go with a no-bid contract.
“We think Anya is uniquely qualified, considering the activities she’d been working on,” he said. “Her rates are competitive and better than other consultants. She can hit the ground running from day one, and we thought that provided the best value to the state.”
In Clasen’s request for a no-bid contract, he cited other consultants who were former top officials from Vermont and Massachusetts. Their hourly rates range from $219 to $395, according to Clasen’s letter — available below.
Wallack said her $200-an-hour rate for this contract is consistent with what she often charges, and says she has signed many no-bid contracts with public and private entities.
Wallack said she couldn’t resist this opportunity to try to reform the heart of Vermont’s health care problems.
“This is the absolute central part of health care reform: Figuring out how we create the most efficient health care system possible in Vermont so that we can cover everybody and ensure we can cover it in the long run,” she said. “It’s the transformation of health care delivery that will make it possible to make the coverage changes we want to make and sustain the financing we want to sustain.”
A proposed single-payer health care system won’t save Vermonters much money without these changes, she said.
“If you just switch how you’re going to pay for it, and don’t do the kind of work we’re talking about under this grant, any kind of solution will be temporary,” Wallack said.
