The Fix Was In All Along

Three weeks ago, Vermont Governor, Peter Shumlin, having failed to secure an absolute majority in the election, throwing the results to the state house, announced that he was scrapping his plans for single payer.

While he claimed that politics had nothing to do with it, a subsequent analysis appears to indicate that he deliberately cast the numbers for single payer in the worst possible light:

Gov. Peter Shumlin could have proposed a financing plan for single payer health care that cost $1 billion less than the one he presented to the public Dec. 17.

Instead, demoralized after a stunning near defeat in the General Election, Shumlin scrapped his long awaited, universal, publicly financed health care plan because he said it would shock Vermont’s fragile economy.

………

But critics say now Vermonters won’t know if single payer could have succeeded in 2015, because after Shumlin decided it wasn’t feasible, he found a way to mitigate the inevitable wave of political backlash and appease his main constituencies: liberal advocates, business leaders, providers, and teacher and state employee unions.

Shumlin had said he would present a menu of options to the Vermont Legislature in the two year run up to the announcement, but instead he presented one plan that Vermonters could not afford.

One of the alternative plans proposed by his health care reform team that was not considered in the final analysis was a much less expensive, $1.6 billion option, that would have offered a universal, publicly financed insurance plan with benefit levels on par with what is available to most Vermonters in the commercial insurance market today, according to documents provided by the Shumlin administration.

“I don’t know exactly when he made that decision, but once it was made, there is no question in my mind that Shumlin pivoted to his roots and his instincts, which are purely political,” said Hamilton Davis, a journalist and longtime observer of Vermont health reform.

“He hung everything he could on it and walked away.”

John Franco, a prominent Burlington attorney who has been involved health care reform for two decades, says that Shumlin purposely chose a plan that covered 94 percent of individuals’ health care costs. Proposing an overly expensive option, Franco says, was a political calculation.

“If you build an airplane out of lead, it’s not going to fly,” Franco said.

………

But buried on the 260th page of the appendices to his report released just before New Year’s Day, is a financing plan that might have been a reasonable starting point for going forward.

This plan would have offered insurance at a level that is equal to the average employer plan now on the market and would have cost $1 billion less than the Cadillac level plan Shumlin rejected.

It appears that he overstated the costs by about $1 billion, which is over $3000 per resident of the state, over $5000 per worker, and that is not including the fact that he, "The Shumlin administration assumed there would be zero administrative savings to the program in year one."

Why did this happen?

Perhaps because the legislature is voting on who gets the next term of Governor tomorrow, and some of the business and medical interests in the state cut a deal not to lobby for his opponent?

There is a part of me that is hoping that the legislature elects the Republican, because Shumlin has been a portrait in cowardice.