The governor announced on Dec. 17 that he would pull the plug on his signature universal publicly financed health care program because the cost would be prohibitive.
The 57-page report detailing how and when his administration came to that conclusion was released just after 4 p.m. Tuesday. The report is accompanied by hundreds of pages of documents, including briefings submitted to the governor and two advisory committees, along with charts, graphs and data from economic modeling simulations conducted by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.
Shumlin said the documents definitively show that he had to give up on single payer because it would have had a negative impact on the state’s economy.
“Fair enough to ask me why it didn’t work, but I’m not sure it’s fair to suggest there was some kind of hidden agenda that we weren’t transparent about,” he said.
“All I would ask you to do before you draw those conclusions is look at what we’re about to release. It shows you the timelines. It shows you when we got what we got, and I think when you see that you won’t have that question anymore,” he added.
Shumlin reiterated that having to abandon single payer is “the biggest disappointment of my political life,” and he acknowledged the frustration of supporters who are angry he won’t be pushing the program forward.
“When I hear from folks saying ‘we’re working Vermonters and Shumlin abandoned a plan that would help us’ well that’s not what the numbers said. The numbers didn’t say this was going to just be hard on business…they said it was going to be hard on working Vermonters,” he said.
Shumlin and his health care team will have a “round table” with reporters on Wednesday to discuss the report, which can be viewed here.
