Dear Editor,
I was glad to see that Blue Cross Blue Shield canceled its proposed “Vermont Basic” health plans. The debate over this proposal showed just how completely disconnected the people designing these plans and our healthcare system have become from the lives of ordinary Vermonters.
To call a plan with an $11,800 deductible before the insurance would bother to kick in an “affordable option” exists only in a policy fantasy bubble. An individual or a family struggling to pay rent, buy groceries and keep up with utility bills in our very high-cost, low-wage society doesn’t suddenly gain access to healthcare just because their monthly premium might drop by a few dollars. They simply trade one unaffordable bill for another.
When people face deductibles this large, they don’t shop for healthcare — another abomination of our high-cost culture — they avoid it altogether. They skip doctor’s visits, delay tests and ration medications until a minor problem becomes a medical crisis. That isn’t insurance. It’s medical roulette.
The Green Mountain Care Board was definitely right to question whether these plans would provide real savings or simply shift more costs onto patients. But the larger problem is that we continue debating how to make inadequate insurance slightly less expensive instead of asking why and what we have done to make our healthcare so unaffordable in the first place.
Too many healthcare decisions are made by people who never have to choose between paying the rent or seeing a doctor. Vermonters need affordable access to care through a universal publicly funded system, not the illusion of affordability created by lower premiums paired with crushing deductibles.
Until our policymakers and our so-called business leaders stop living inside this fantasy bubble and start listening to the people forced to live with these plans, healthcare will always look affordable in the executive suites and completely out of reach in real life.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier, Vt.
