Vermont Considers Single-Payer Health Insurance

Gov. Peter Shumlin, center,  holds a news conference on Jan. 18 to discuss support for Vermont's health reform efforts. Shumlin was joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch. (AP)

Gov. Peter Shumlin, center, holds a news conference on Jan. 18 to discuss support for Vermont's health reform efforts. Shumlin was joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders, left, Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch. (AP)

While Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is hoping to change the way insurance companies pay health care providers by 2014, his counterpart in Vermont is hoping to achieve something much more dramatic by then.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin wants to introduce a single-payer health care system in the Green Mountain State, like the systems in place in Canada and Britain.

Vermont lawmakers are debating the measure now. Vermont Public Radio’s Bob Kinzel reports from Montpelier.

  • Don

    This is great news. Once VT has tried a single payer system and seen it fail, the rest of the country will have positive proof that single payer does not work in the US.

    BTW, Canada and Britain have different systems. Canada has a single payer system. Britain has a single provider system. All doctors are government employees. As a result, very few Brits want to become doctors, and most of their doctors are imported from abroad, often from poor countries that desperately need them.

    The current President of Syria was a doctor in Britain once.

  • jack

    DON i hope you’re right as we don’t need this disaster

  • sanwitte

    Companies will be barred from instituting caps on coverage when your costs for treatments goes up due to sickness, you can now get insurance with out caps on coverage at “Wise Health Insurance” search them online.

  • Bruce

    We don’t need this “disaster” b/c the healthcare system here in the US is so great. Only 45,000 people a year die from lack of health insurance and nothing is done. But if someone murders someone or a terrorist kills people, we have accountability. Great system Americans have.

  • Terra

    Guess after I am finished with college I will have to move to Vermont! Way to go Vermont!

  • Don

    Beware of scams! “sanwitte” is a criminal, and “Wise Health Insurance” is run by mobsters.

    No respectable company would use forum spam. Learn how to recognize it. Save the name “Wise Health Insurance” in your “Beware.doc” file.

  • Vermonter

    Shumlin recently went to see Obama in an move to ensure the single payer system would receive federal funds so that it does not appear as a failure. We in Vermont had a sample of social medicine with Catamount Heath Care, which failed miserably, docotors refused to take. No with single payer doctors will have only one option and that is to move out of the state, which our primary care physician as well as our kids pediatrician have already warned us they and many of their colleagues would be doing the same. This will drain the doctors, nurse, and dentist from the state and eventually will bankrupt the state once the federal money is gone. Ask yourself this, if single payer is so good then why do so many Canadians come down into Vermont to have procedures done??? This is wrong and is a financial disaster waiting to happen, since when has government run anything efficiently or effectively???

  • Vermonter

    Bruce you might want to do a google search to see how many people die each year on the various single payer systems throughout the world, you will be shocked. Add to that the people that get pulled off the list due to their conditions worsening while waiting and no longer being eligible, a panel decides this, then add to that those people waiting for a simple procedure that then have to have a different procedure due to the condition worsening. Once you read enough of the stories of kids dieing waiting for a procedure that would easily have saved their life, or the one about the child that needed a simple procedure but due to the 3 month wait ended up loosing an arm, then talk to me about how great this new system will be. You life will be based upon a waiting list and then perhaps in the hands of a panel that could arbitrarily remove you from the list, research it there are real life examples of this, many of them.

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