Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mary Alice Bisbee, a retired social worker who lives in subsidized housing in Montpelier.
[A]s the campaigns for governor and lieutenant governor become more heated every day, I would like to say that in my opinion, the choice is even more clear. So many of us have been fighting for over 20 years for a single payer health care system which with Act 48 will soon be a reality with the right candidates chosen. No one seems to like what we have had to go through with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has only led to higher out-of-pocket costs for consumers and employers due to the flawed method of payment through traditional insurance premiums to private insurance companies.
The whole idea of a single payer plan is that our tax payments will substitute for insurance premiums for everyone! The plan most single payer advocates espouse would go something like this:
If you don’t pay taxes now, you probably will pay nothing for your health care in 2017, due to your low-income status. If you have a really high income, you will pay more to offset this disparity. Middle-income folks will probably pay about the same, or maybe less, due to the savings realized from having no high CEO costs for insurance companies trying to outbid each other for customers and the fact that all paperwork will be the same for everyone regardless of one’s ability to pay.
I will be voting for Gov. Peter Shumlin to continue his efforts toward this important goal. I also will proudly support Dean Corren for lieutenant governor.
I certainly do not see that this plan is at all “reckless or radical.” We are just about the only industrialized country that does not have such a plan and Vermont, with its small, more homogeneous population than many other states, is a great place to try it out. It is important to remember that only one Canadian province introduced this plan originally, which was later adopted by the entire country. And though there have been several flaws in the Canadian system, we can learn from their mistakes as well and offer our experience as a model for the nation. (The ACA would have been much more cost saving if the insurance companies had not lobbied hard to include cost competition in its flawed implementation.)
This is the reason that I will be voting for Gov. Peter Shumlin to continue his efforts toward this important goal. I also will proudly support Dean Corren for lieutenant governor, who received enough signatures of real Vermonters to warrant public campaign financing and who will contribute his well-earned expertise in designing universal health care, managing his business and working for environmental justice and a sustainable future, for the betterment of our state. I would like to know that his will be the deciding vote in the Senate if there is a tie.
While higher education has always needed more attention in Vermont, I think Scott Milne’s idea of taking money away from K-12 education to pay for higher education is much more reckless and radical than single payer health care.
There are pluses and minuses to all the candidates, but in the long run we will be better off, I believe, to stick with the current health care goal for 2017 than to change the top horse in midstream and get mired in the mud. The idea of a lieutenant governor who will take on more duties in health care reform than are currently required is also a big plus.
