| One of the issues in this year's campaign was Peter Shumlin's call for a single payer health care system. There was a lot of skirmishing, with Peter arguing that single payer is the best way to structure health care financing and Dubie arguing that, regardless of its merits, single payer is off the table because it isn't allowed under the Affordable Care Act. Peter's response was that we can ask for a waiver, and they'll probably grant it. Not bad, but it depends on getting the waiver, and getting it years before the law says we can ask for it. Today we learn that things may be changing. Scott Brown, the new Senator from Massachusetts whose qualifications are apparently limited to the fact that he owns a truck and has, in the past, had the ability to make women salivate,is working with Oregon Senator Ron Wyden to "fix" the Affordable Care Act. According to Ezra Klein in today's Washington Post: The Wyden/Brown legislation would allow states to propose their alternatives now and start implementing them in 2014, rather than wasting time and money setting up a federal structure that they don’t plan to use.
Also, according to Klein, even Orin Hatch supports this idea. And who benefits from this idea? Here's Klein again: One state that wants to prove it is Sanders’s Vermont. “As a single-payer advocate,” he says, “I believe that at the end of the day, if a state goes forward and passes an effective single-payer program, it will demonstrate that you can provide quality health care to every man, woman and child in a more cost effective way. So I wanted to make sure that states have that option.” Vermont’s governor-elect, Peter Shumlin, is on the same page. “Vermont needs a single-payer system,” he said during the campaign.
These are early days and there's a lot that could go wrong with this proposal. Still, if Peter Shumlin, working with Bernie Sanders (exactly what he said he'd do in his campaign) can get some traction for a waiver to try a single payer system in Vermont, this will be not only a huge benefit for the people of Vermont, but a tremendous accomplishment for our new governor. |
