BURLINGTON — Louis Meyers ran for office in Vermont in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. The first three times he sought to join the state Senate. Most recently he ran for the U.S. House. None of his electoral forays were successful.
Now, in a new bid for a state Senate seat representing the Chittenden Southeast district, the Shelburne physician is campaigning with a new strategy: making health care a central pillar of his platform.
The decision to run this year “started with health care,” Meyers said in an interview. “And having 30 years of experience in health care watching this process, watching health care getting worse, not better, in the direction we’re going.”
The Democratic primary race pits him against three incumbents seeking to retain their seats: Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, Sen. Thomas Chittenden and Sen. Ginny Lyons, who has chaired the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare since 2019.
The Republican primary in the strongly Democratic district, which encompasses South Burlington, Shelburne, Charlotte, Williston and part of Burlington, among other towns, has drawn only one candidate, Bruce Roy, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and IBM “business leader,” according to his campaign.
Vermont almost always favors incumbents, and the three senators have served in the Statehouse for about a combined 40 years.
“I think our race is one of the sleepier races this election season, this primary season,” Ram Hinsdale said.
But if Meyers manages a better-than-expected showing, it could be a sign that his message — that Vermont is heading the wrong direction when it comes to health care — is resonating.
It’s no secret that Vermont’s system of providing care is struggling. Health insurance premiums are rising rapidly, wait times to see practitioners are long, and most of the state’s hospitals have been losing money.
“There’s a great sense of unease in Vermont and in this district,” Meyers said. People are ready for “new perspective, new voices and in my case, new experience with health care.”
Meyers has been a hospitalist at Rutland Regional Medical Center since 2013. Before that, he practiced primary care in Virginia for 16 years. He has also worked as a probation officer in Washington, D.C. One of his refrains is that Vermont has not elected a physician to the Senate in 45 years.
Nurses and other health professionals have served in both the House and Senate in recent years, and doctors have served recent terms in the House. John Bloomer, the secretary of the Senate and a former member of the body, said he was not aware of any doctors in the Senate within the past several decades, but he said he could not immediately confirm the assertion. He noted that Howard Dean, a physician, served as the lieutenant governor from 1987 to 1991, a role in which he presided over the Senate.
Meyers has staked out positions on several issues, such as the need for more housing, “intensive recruitment” of police and simplifying Vermont’s education finance system. But his campaign materials have generally put health care front and center. “Patients are deeply frustrated, providers are discouraged, and tax payers are footing the bill,” reads one campaign ad.
In an interview, Meyers spoke of the need to strengthen independent medical practices, floated the possibility of expanding Medicaid, and criticized high-paid health care administrators and the University of Vermont Medical Center’s influence in the state.
In a July candidates’ forum hosted by Town Meeting TV, Meyers and Lyons clashed briefly over the AHEAD Model, a new federal health care reform project intended to change how hospitals get paid and direct more resources to primary care, as well as Lyons’ support of a bill to shift some of the authority of the Green Mountain Care Board to the Agency of Human Services.
“Sen. Lyons would like to take that power away from them and put it in the governor’s office,” Meyers said. “I respectfully disagree.”
In a rebuttal, Lyons said that was a misrepresentation of her position. “Putting the control in the governor’s office? Never heard that one before,” she said. “And I’m ashamed to hear it from someone who’s sitting next to me.”
In interviews, Lyons and her fellow incumbent senators pointed to a variety of recent health care initiatives and legislation that they helped set in motion: a sweeping effort to assess the performance of Vermont’s hospitals; the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to more Medicare patients; and legislation intended to bring down drug costs and limit insurers’ ability to reject practitioners’ orders.
“We’re all very disturbed about health care generally. We want to make it better,” Lyons said when asked about Meyers’ challenge. “I think that I haven’t heard any fresh ideas.”
But making a dent in high prices and a lack of access is easier said than done, Lyons and her colleagues said.
“I just think a lot of this is entwined with federal policies that (have) been entrenched for the last 80 years, that there’s no easy answer,” Chittenden said.
“When you’re trying to turn the Titanic,” Lyons said, “it doesn’t happen overnight.”
