Bill Schubart, a retired businessman, is a regular columnist for VTDigger.
Responding to a barrage of questions on a recent radio call-in show about how he will address Vermont’s challenges, Gov. Phil Scott repeatedly responded: “Show me a plan.” “Where’s the plan?”
Good question.
Imagine a volleyball court with three sides, a triangular net, three teams, and multiple balls spiked back and forth. This may help you see how the government, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors juggle society’s needs. The balls swatted from side to side to side are social, environmental and economic challenges kept airborne by deep divisions in our philosophy of governing.
Arguably, two of our most important needs are public education and health care, and they deserve the most collaboration between the three sectors, yet, arguably, get the least.
Under both the Vermont Constitution and the federal Constitution, public education in Vermont is solely the government’s responsibility. As the student population declines and students are siphoned off by private schools – paid for in part by tax-funded vouchers – our expectations of schools are expanding. Private schools are not obligated to take “special needs” children, as are public schools, and public schools today are expected to remediate the impact on children of multiple “adverse childhood experiences” such as homelessness, hunger, abuse, emotional disorders, addicted parents, and lack of access to health care. All these problems should be addressed upstream by the three sectors working together. Such cross-sector efforts do occur but are largely uncoordinated. If business, philanthropy, and government looked strategically at the challenges in public education today, we could surely find more effective and cost-efficient solutions.
Health care, another vital service for Vermonters, also hangs in the inter-sectional airspace. In the ’80s, Vermont decided not to issue certificates of need, essentially permits, to for-profit hospitals, although many clinics, dentists, group practices, and urgent care centers remain for-profit businesses while others, like The Open Door Clinic in Middlebury, are nonprofits. Nonprofit hospitals, like public schools, have an “obligation to treat” anyone presenting; businesses don’t.
Health care insurance is available both from competing for-profit and regulated not-for-profit companies. Many businesses voluntarily offer plans to their employees. Unions, where they exist, impose coverage for others, and some independents pay between $700 and $1,400 a month for private insurance with varying degrees of coverage and copays. This mash-up of business, government, and nonprofit sectors largely provides Vermonters with quality health care, but it’s limited to those who can afford it. About 20,000 Vermonters have no health insurance and many who do can’t afford copays.
Arguably, the most severe need in Vermont is for mental health treatment options. Many patients presenting in emergency rooms may wait days or weeks for an open bed. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a minimum of 50 in-patient beds per 100,000 people is the minimum needed to accommodate mental illness. Vermont has four per 100,000 currently.
Some sectors try to work together, but their collaborations are rarely strategic or coordinated. Elements of the broad social safety net: homelessness, hunger, lack of access to health care, inadequate public transportation, child care bounce between the three sectors with government assuming certain functions, and contracting to business and nonprofits for others. Many businesses do their share, opting for livable wages, contributions to health care coverage, child care, and retirement. But even with all three sectors chipping in to fight homelessness and hunger, the combined effort is inadequate to meet the needs of too many Vermonters, and child care capacity is declining.
On the predatory side, corrections has traditionally been a government function, but years of politically and even racially motivated criminal justice practice filled our government prisons to overcapacity, leaving the business sector to enter the market. Vermont has about 250 prisoners housed in a for-profit prison in Mississippi with limited oversight or accountability by the Vermont Department of Corrections. “Concierge prisons” have opened in the West for those who can afford their luxuries – a prime example of laissez-faire policy making. Economic development bounces ineffectively between all three sectors.
Traditionally, the government sector has managed the design and oversight of public education, a postal system, state and federal highway networks, public safety, the national defense, the criminal justice system, and legislative and judicial systems. President Teddy Roosevelt added environmental and monopoly regulation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added power generation and distribution and economic development, both now shared to varying degrees with the business sector. FDR’s signature addition was Social Security. Nixon and others favored adding health care but that remains under debate 50 years later.
Neoliberals and conservatives argue passionately for the privatization of the postal system, corrections, education, national parks, public safety, highway management, Social Security and even the national defense, which currently uses contracted mercenary forces to a limited degree. They believe that minimal government will produce the best social and economic outcomes and that the business sector – read, deregulated, low-taxed capitalism – is a more powerful delivery system than government, leaving unmet objectives to the philanthropic sector.
Liberals tend to have greater trust in government, but want a government free of influence-peddling money. They advocate for additional government programs that require either realignment of current government expenditures or additional taxation, making the case that simply touting a thriving economy, the benchmarks of which are stock market indicators and employment figures, ignores the real-life struggles that the employed have keeping up with lagging compensation growth and accelerating living costs.
However, as the nation becomes more polarized, the great middle of the liberal-conservative spectrum is evaporating in heat generated by those on both sides who have despaired of government’s capacity to achieve anything on their behalf.
This is self-defeating. We have the resources but lack the leadership and strategy. We need to come to agreement on how to use Vermont’s powerful government ($6.1 billion), business ($32 billion GDP), and nonprofit sectors ($6 billion) most efficiently and effectively to make Vermont a more secure place to live, while setting new rules for collaboration and accountability.
Governor, we have no plan and no plan for even making a plan. Who’s leading?
