Vermont – Healthcare-NOW

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…

As Vermont Goes, So Goes the Nation?

By Molly Worthen for The New York Times – When most liberals hear the words “third party,” they have nasty flashbacks to Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaign in 2000. The history buffs among them might think of the populist Greenback Party’s feckless protests against the gold standard in the 19th century or the five presidential campaigns…

Single-Payer Is Not Dead

By Froma Harrop for Real Clear Politics – The prospects for single-payer health care — adored by many liberals, despised by private health insurers and looking better all the time to others — did not die in the Affordable Care Act. It was thrown a lifeline through a little-known provision tucked in the famously long…

Vermont House Committee Considers Road to Single Payer

From the Brattleboro Reformer – The health care committee of the Vermont House is lining up some of the tasks that will have to be finished before the state rolls out the first-in-the-nation single payer health care system, now scheduled for 2017. Meeting Friday at the Statehouse, the committee heard from legislative staffers who outlined…

Shumlin Payroll Tax to Fund Single Payer Unpalatable to Business

By Andrew Stein for VTDigger.org – If Gov. Peter Shumlin pursues a payroll tax to fund a publicly financed health care system, he will meet heavy resistance from one of the state’s most influential business groups. Betsy Bishop, president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, says her organization and its members would not look favorably…

Vermont Single-Payer Financing Plan Released

By Andrew Stein for VTDigger.org – The Shumlin administration released two financing plans Thursday evening: one for funding a publicly financed health care system and another to pay for portions of the state’s new health benefit exchange. The much-anticipated single-payer financing plan provides more of a map of the state’s health care finance landscape than…

Vermont Could Be First In Line for Single Payer

By Joanne Kenen for Politico – Most governors are, at best, slogging their way through the world of health reform implementation. Vermont’s Gov. Peter Shumlin is hurtling through it. Vermont is the only state to have set itself on a path to a single-payer health care system, using the national health care law as a…

VT Gov. Shumlin Pushes For Single-Payer Health Care At DNC

From Vermont Public Radio – Governor Peter Shumlin says he hopes Congress will amend the Affordable Care Act to allow individual states to implement a single payer health care system as soon as possible. Shumlin says controlling health care costs is critical to creating new jobs and he’s convinced that a single payer plan is…

Can SEIU Help Vermonters Win Single Payer?

By Steve Early for Labor Notes – While the nation waits for an overdue Supreme Court decision that will decide the fate of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, another health care drama with wide implications for universal health care is just starting in Vermont. Prodded by a strong grassroots movement, the Vermont legislature voted last…

Insurance firms seeking to sow doubt about single-payer in Vermont

By Wendell Potter for IWatchNews.org – You can’t see them. They’re hidden from view and probably always will be. But the health insurance industry’s big guns are in place and pointed directly at the citizens of Vermont. Health insurers were not able to stop the state’s drive last year toward a single-payer health care system,…