Vermonters will pay over $4 billion for health care next year. That’s right 4 billion, with a “B”.
Yes, health care costs continue to climb, increasing by 10% or more each year with Vermont families on average now paying well over $12,000 per year. It is a sizable chunk of our overall income and it will only go up if we do not act.
It is an increasingly unreasonable burden on families, employers, school and town budgets and taxpayers. Businesses are becoming more vocal about the need to get out from under it and school boards are seeing how it drives up local budgets and property taxes. We must lower these costs. Our current efforts to patch a broken system are clearly not doing the job.
Like every Vermonter, you deserve quality, health care that is affordable and not tied to where or whether you work.
We should move towards a health care “system” that includes every Vermonter in one insurance pool: a kind of Vermont self-insurance plan that provides care for all of us based on our ability to pay. It is not too different than how we pay for police or fire protection. We may not need it now, but we chip in because it is important to have it when we do. It means switching to more public funding. But, it also means your premiums will go down significantly, maybe disappear completely.
A Vermont self-insurance plan will change how we pay for and how we bill for care. It will not change how we receive health care, except providers will be able to spend more time with patients and less chasing down payments from insurance companies.
In fact, about 30 cents of every dollar we spend on health care now is spent on paperwork, administration and insurance company bureaucracy. It is a true waste of money. Study after study shows that a simple system like a Vermont self-insurance plan with a one “administrator” or “biller,” will save tens of millions of dollars that we can then invest in the health care we need.
We are lucky in Vermont. We have good quality health care and great providers. Now lets make it affordable. I know we can.