In preparation for a biennium that is likely to spell the fate of Vermont’s planned public universal health care program, the Legislature is looking to hire an array of top-flight consultants.
Lawmakers appropriated $800,000 for the Joint Fiscal Office to spend on health reform consulting services over the next two years.
The newly formed joint legislative Health Reform Oversight Committee met this week to advise JFO on hiring a consultant to do detailed financial modeling on the state’s current health care system.
“Before entertaining any transition to a new health care system we need to have a full understanding of who pays today,” said Rep. Mike Fisher, D-Lincoln, chair of the House Health Care Committee.
The firm that’s hired will do an “incidence analysis” to provide a granular view of how and how much individuals, businesses and government pay for health care as well as what health services those payments cover, said Sen. Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden.
Ashe was appointed co-chair of the new committee alongside Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais.
“It seems perhaps too easy to outsiders that we would know all that, but very few states have probably gotten to a point where they understand that at such a detailed level,” Ashe said.
The Shumlin administration is doing the same microeconomic modeling of the state’s health care system, though the contractor they hire will also run simulations of how the different financing models the administration is considering might affect people’s behavior and examine possible economic reverberations.
It’s important for the two branches of government to do their homework on the current system independently, Fisher said.
But among the four groups that placed a bid to do the Legislature’s analysis are the Rand Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which also placed bids to do the similar but more far reaching analysis for the administration.
The administration had hoped to have its contractor hired and working by July 1, because they only have six months until they are expected to release a financing proposal to lawmakers, but Robin Lunge, director of Health Care Reform, said she and her team are still reviewing bids.
JFO will also use some of the $800,000 appropriation to hire an economist who will help lawmakers examine the administration’s proposal.
