UVM Health Network now has virtual control over how the money from Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurers is spent. It will in essence be paying itself via its accountable care organization (Vermont’s sole ACO implementing the state’s all-payer model).
Today’s Republican Party seems to define itself sadly by what it opposes, defaulting to an adversarial position on anything proposed by Vermont’s dominant Democrats.
Our own basic ignorance of government’s purpose and function and our inability to differentiate fact from political propaganda could sound our democracy’s death knell.
I have always revered the Vermont motto because it challenges us to seek balance between “freedom and unity” — between me/mine and us/ours. I am grateful for my freedoms, but also for my community.
Only now, with the severe climate impacts from this exploitation hitting home, are we beginning to understand what the Abenaki have known for years.
If we don’t join together to reimagine public education as a cost-efficient institution that fulfills our constitutional obligation to provide a free and effective education to our citizens — one that embraces change — we’re flunking this test.
I appreciate a well-reasoned conservative argument and often find myself in agreement with some or all of what I hear, but the far right’s invectives against a sincere effort to confront the implicit bias and racism of the past at a deeper level seems to me sound and fury signifying nothing.
We must rebuild an economy that values the working class and awards them wages adequate to own a home, raise a family, and ensure the rudiments of well-being.
A disturbing lack of vision, leadership, policy formation, and accountability in health care strategy is at the root of the Vermont problem.
A gun designed for hunting is an intrinsically different killing tool than a military weapon designed to kill as many of the enemy as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Naively, I had assumed that the measure of diversity in a school system was the number of languages spoken — some 20. But the metrics are much more complex. Imagine a diversity of diets, dress, medicines, gender relationships, and religious traditions.
A parent’s duty is not to take the easier, softer way that results in adulation, but instead to raise resilient, responsible adults. The parallel for the legislator is the duty to make the difficult decisions that underlie a just and sustainable society.
Bill Schubart is a retired businessman and active fiction writer, and a former chair of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization for VTDigger.
Today, the $2.7 billion earmarked for Vermont includes $731 million worth of direct $1,400 payments to those earning less than $75,000 and $152 million for rental assistance, as well as $47 million for child care subsidies and support for child care providers.