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The logic is simple: The more young doctors who are trained in Vermont, the more who are likely to stay and root their careers here.
That’s at least what Michael Costas, the CEO of Gifford Medical Center, told lawmakers on the House Health Care Committee Thursday.
Costas is also the lead executive of the fledgeling Maple Mountain Consortium residency program, an effort to train family medicine residents at a small rural health care clinic rather than at a large academic medical center — such as UVM Medical Center or Dartmouth Hitchcock. The residents will train at Lamoille Health Partners, in Morrisville, and Gifford Medical Center, in Randolph. The program aims to bring in four residents each year, for a total of 12 working residents in the three-year program.
It’s an attempt to address the growing concern that the demand for primary care in Vermont is fast outpacing the supply of docs who can provide it — especially in rural clinics.
“We know that we need to pass the torch to a new generation of physicians. We somehow have to bring them to Vermont, and we think that we can train them here,” Costas said.
Enter the Maple Mountain residency, which would train doctors fresh out of medical school. Just last year, the project received official accreditation to admit residents to its three-year program.
“We have a car. The car is built. It’s been inspected. You need to turn the key,” Costas said.
But, the program’s directors are still a ways off from letting the rubber hit the road and admitting the first class of residents. Across the nation, each new class of residents starts training in July, and Maple Mountain was not ready to admit any residents for the July 2026 start date.
Matching residents for a 2027 start? Well, that also “seems pretty tough at this point,” Costas said.
The biggest obstacle is money. Costas outlined a funding gap of $4.06 million to set up and sustain the program over the next four or five years.
Maple Mountain already received a $500,000 planning and development grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which helped with startup costs.
Now, Costas and his colleagues running the program are looking at opportunities available in the Rural Health Transformation Fund or in federal programs, with funding designated specifically for this type of clinic-based education, to close that gap.
While the 12 residents are expected to conduct somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 primary care visits a year, the estimated cost of training each resident ($209,623) still outweighs what Maple Mountain expects to receive in federal funding for each participant ($160,000).
It’s a big gap but not one Costas sees eclipsing the program’s ability to move forward.
“We’re really at the point of ‘it’s ready to go.’ We need funding to make sure that we can keep whatever promises we make to those residents when we ask them to move here and train here,” he said.
— Olivia Gieger
In the know
State Treasurer Mike Pieciak continues to beat the drum on his proposal for Vermont to join a prescription drug card consortium as the bill works its way through the Legislature.
The bill, H.577, would have Vermont join a five-state consortium that pools states’ purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices, called ArrayRX. It would allow anyone with a Vermont address to register for a free ArrayRX card, which they could use to get prescriptions at the bulk price, instead of using health insurance.
In a Thursday afternoon press conference, House sponsors of the bill, its Senate supporters and a number of health care industry advocates joined Pieciak to mark the bill’s passage through the House.
The new CEO of BlueCross BlueShield of VT, Beth Roberts, also joined the group to throw her support behind the bill. She said that nearly a quarter of every dollar increase in health insurance premiums is driven by the cost of prescription drugs.
“We know Vermonters are frustrated by the high cost of health care. Drug prices are a significant piece of that, and they have been rising at unsustainable rates for quite some period of time,” Roberts said.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, said that her Health and Welfare Committee is eager to get to work on passing it.
—Olivia Gieger
Lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee are considering a bill approved by the House, H.849, that would allow someone to file a civil lawsuit for damages against any government official — including federal officers — who has violated their constitutional rights.
Under current federal law, someone can only sue for damages if a state or local official violates their rights, leaving out the same protections against federal actions. The federal law has long been used to prosecute police officers accused of misconduct.
Now lawmakers in Vermont are seeking to extend those protections to potentially offer legal remedies to those harmed by federal agents.
Tucker Jones, general counsel for the Vermont Department of Public Safety, which includes the Vermont State Police, had no strong words on the bill for the committee Thursday.
“The issue of this bill as applied to federal officials isn’t something the Department of Public Safety has a direct interest in, because we’re obviously more focused on the impact of this on state and county and local officials,” Jones said.
As the bill is currently drafted, Jones said he didn’t think it would open up state and local officials to more liability.
— Charlotte Oliver
Rep. Alyssa Black, D-Essex Town, had a bit of a “fan girl” moment Thursday when Lisa Rosenbaum, a cardiologist and the host of the New England Journal of Medicine podcast “Not Otherwise Specified,” zoomed into the House Health Committee to chat all things primary care.
Black hoped that the visit could be a good primer for the committee before it takes up a bill making its way over from the Senate focused on increasing access to family docs.
Rosenbaum just spent the past season of her podcast dedicated to the topic of improving primary care and penned a five-part essay series on the topic that ran this fall. The nerds in Room 42 have been following along closely, and seemed pretty chuffed to pick her brain further.
— Olivia Gieger
Batter up
Former Boston Red Sox pitcher, and one-time candidate for Vermont governor, Bill “Spaceman” Lee paid Gov. Phil Scott a visit Thursday.
“I guess he’s not pitching today,” Scott said at his weekly press conference. Lee gifted the governor a shiny, wooden-looking bat that he made. Upon mention of the bat, Seven Days reporter Kevin McCallum took it upon himself to pick up the bat and play with it.
— Charlotte Oliver
