MONTPELIER, Vt.—An outgoing Vermont state senator says the health care plan he formulated is the only one left standing after Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin ditched his single-payer agenda in December.
Peter Galbraith, a two-term state senator and former U.S. ambassador, spent the past legislative session working to provide Vermonters with universal health care.
Despite his work and pragmatic approach, the Windham County Democrat was pushed aside as Shumlin endorsed a now-defunct dummy plan used largely to rally supporters in the lead-up to the election.
In a recent interview, Galbraith criticized Shumlin’s approach, saying the governor bypassed a workable, affordable health care plan to pursue a flawed proposal based on Act 48.
“The problem with the Shumlin proposal and the Act 48 approach is that it was coerced on the 60 percent of the population that already has health care that works for them, instead of focusing on the 7 percent who are uninsured and the 20 percent to 30 percent who are inadequately insured,” Galbraith said.
The demise of Shumlin’s proposal “makes the plan I put forward the only viable option to achieve the goal of universal coverage,” he said.
According to Galbraith, single-payer advocates frequently dismissed alternatives in their quest to back the Shumlin plan, which was dumped unceremoniously on Dec. 17.
“The guys who were pushing this were so ideological. Even when there was already government-provided health care for federal employees, military and Medicare recipients, they wanted to force those people into the system as well. In the case of Medicare and Tricare, these are single-payer systems,” he said.
Had Galbraith’s work been adopted, the plan would have provided Vermonters a Gold Plan at a fraction of the $2.6 billion associated with the Shumlin plan.
“What you would do is take the Silver Plan on the exchanges that get federal subsidies, and the state would build it up to a Gold Plan. It would actually provide subsidies to everybody who signed up,” Galbraith said. “The cost of providing people a Gold for the cost of a Silver, and having subsidies, would be about $350 million, which would be covered by a 2 percent payroll tax. That’s much less disruptive.”
