In recent a commentary published by VTDigger and the Burlington Free Press, Sen. Joe Benning, R-Caledonia, said the governor used an estimate of $2.6 billion for the first-year cost of a single-payer health care program.
That figure, which is higher than others generally referred to by the administration, appears to have been a misunderstanding. The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office and the Vermont Agency of Administration released a consensus estimate in February that put the range at $1.8 billion to $2.2 billion. Those are the figures often referred to by the governor.
Benning told VTDigger that he heard Gov. Peter Shumlin say costs could reach $2.6 billion at a legislative breakfast in St. Johnsbury in April.
Benning may have misheard the governor, but Shumlin also got the numbers wrong. In a video from Kingdom Access TV, the governor says first-year state costs are estimated at between $1.8 billion to $2.4 billion. The governor was speaking without notes and taking questions on a variety of topics and he must have misspoken, according to a spokesman.
Shumlin’s remark is prefaced by a disclaimer that nobody knows what it would cost to cover all Vermonters in 2017, “but we’re making the best effort of any state in America to make sure it’s less than it would be if we’d done nothing.”
The year 2017 is the earliest Vermont could obtain a federal waiver to transition to a public universal health care program, often called single-payer.
Benning said he did not check the $2.6 billion figure before he penned his commentary.
“Frankly, that’s my mistake,” Benning said, adding that he will have to make amends for the error and offer his apologies to the governor.
Benning ran with the number he thought he heard, he said, because he reasoned that the governor may have revised the administration/JFO estimate upward to account for the health costs related to treating opiate addicts.
Benning stands by the points he makes in the commentary, namely that the governor – as Shumlin readily acknowledged at the legislative breakfast – doesn’t know what a single-payer program will cost in its first year and that the governor hasn’t said how he would pay for it, Benning said.
The commentary also calls for Vermont to abandon the program and try to provide universal coverage and contain costs by other means.
The administration is expected to present a financing plan for a single payer health care program to lawmakers in January.
