Forget Obamacare
Vermont wants to bring single payer to America
By Sarah Kliff for Vox –
Saskatchewan is a vast prairie province in the middle of Canada. It’s home to hockey great Gordie Howe and the world’s first curling museum. But Canadians know it for another reason: it’s the birthplace of the country’s single-payer health-care system.
In 1947, Saskatchewan began doing something very different from the rest of the country: it decided to pay the hospital bills for all residents. The system was popular and effective — and other provinces quickly took notice. Neighboring Alberta started a hospital insurance plan in 1950, and by 1961 all ten Canadian provinces provided hospital care. In 1966, Canada passed a national law that grew hospital insurance to a more comprehensive insurance plan like the one that exists today.
Saskatchewan showed that a single-payer health-care system can start small and scale big. And across the border, six decades later, Vermont wants to pull off something similar. The state is three years deep in the process of building a government-owned and -operated health insurance plan that, if it gets off the ground, will cover Vermont’s 620,000 residents — and maybe, eventually, all 300 million Americans.
“If Vermont gets single-payer health care right, which I believe we will, other states will follow,” Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin predicted in a recent interview. “If we screw it up, it will set back this effort for a long time. So I know we have a tremendous amount of responsibility, not only to Vermonters.”
When Shumlin ran on a single-payer platform in 2010, it was unprecedented. No statewide candidate — not in Vermont, not anywhere — had campaigned on the issue, and with good political reason. Government-run health insurance is divisive. When the country began debating health reform in 2009, polls showed single-payer to be the least popular option.
Shumlin just barely sold Vermont voters on the plan (he beat his Republican opponent by less than one percentage point). Then, he got the Vermont legislature on board, too. On May 26, 2011, Shumlin signed Act 48, a law passed by the Vermont House and Senate that committed the state to building the country’s first single-payer system.
Now comes the big challenge: paying for it. Act 48 required Vermont to create a single-payer system by 2017. But the state hasn’t drafted a bill that spells out how to raise the approximately $2 billion a year Vermont needs to run the system. The state collects only $2.7 billion in tax revenue each year, so an additional $2 billion is a vexingly large sum to scrape together.