by Andy Coates
Peter Shumlin was elected Governor of Vermont on his plans to close down Entergy’s aging, unsafe Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, to transition to green energy and to increase passenger rail, to reduce prison spending, his strong pro-choice stance, and, of course, single-payer healthcare for every Vermonter.
PNHP has already posted the VPR news story that excerpts an interview by Bob Kinzel. But you can also listen to the full interview with Governor-elect Shumlin.
Here is my own transcript. At about 10 minutes into the interview the Governor-elect talks about health spending briefly:
Big picture. I have a dual task. The first is to manage this 112, 115 million dollar hole. But the second is simultaneously, in managing this budget, we’ve got to start managing the infrastructure. We’ve got to put the pieces in place that I believe will do two things. The first is grow jobs and grow economic opportunities that I’m incredibly optimistic about for Vermont. And the second is, at the same time, we wil be solving our own budget problems.
Now, where is the money? We know that the first and the fastest area of growth in the state budget is health care. It’s killing us just like it’s killing Vermont’s families and small businesses. So we need to be putting the infrastructure changes in place, putting a team together that’s going to work with Dr. Hsaio and others to come with a plan, to pass a single payer health care plan that can contain costs and save Vermont from ourselves as we spend a million dollars more a day than we spent the day before.
And then a second area that I’ve talked so much about is corrections. It’s the second area of growth in the state budget. It is not sustainable…
At 33 minutes the Governor-elect returns to single payer:
Welcome back to Vermont Edition. I’m Bob Kinzel. Our guest today is Governor-elect Peter Shumlin. Our phone number is […] Governor-elect I see you’re going to the White House in early December as part of a contingent of new governors meeting with the President. So do I understand that you may use this as an opportunity to try to pitch the idea that Vermont needs some “waivers” from the federal government, particularly in the area of health care?
Yes. I had the privilege of talking to the President of the United States earlier today. He called me from Air Force One. A lot of bizarre things have happened to me in the last five days, but that’s one of them. You pick up the phone and there’s the President at the other end of the line. It was a real honor.
But I mentioned two things to him. That I was looking for three waivers. And then I also said there’s a famous photograph of our current Governor, Jim Douglas, moving a couch down at the White House. I just told him that I was a little bit younger than Jim Douglas, nothing personal, but if he had any furniture to move, I’d come right down, just let me know when they needed things moved around down there.
But the answer is yes. We’re looking forward to working with the President and the Congressional delegation to get three waivers that I really want.
Looking at the health care one, supposedly it’s going to be at least until 2014 before any state can get a waiver. Who knows what’s going to happen to that health care law in the next two years, with Republican gains in Congress. Do you really think you can move it up from 2014 to 2012?
You know Bob this was tough to say during the campaign because it’s often hard to change the dialogue during the campaign: The “waivers” is the easy part.
The hard part is designing a single payer health care system that works and that delivers quality health care, gets insurers off our, our providers backs, has a reimbursement system that makes sense. You know we’re losing our primary care doctors. We’re going to lose our hospitals if we keep up this crazy system where they get paid 40 cents for one customer, 60 cents for another. They’re awash in a sea of paper and bureaucracy. They have insurers second-guessing them on everything that they do. The list goes on and on. So the challenge for us is not the waivers. I get that the waivers are a small challenge.
The bigger challenge is to say, to sit down with the plans that we’re going to be given. To bring together the health care community, the business community, families, consumers, providers, insurers, and design the system that does three things. Delivers quality health care to all Vermonters where health care is a right and not a privilege. Second, is affordable. The current system is going to drown us. It will bankrupt us. We can’t spend a million dollars more a day than we did the day before. Third, provide outcomes-based medicine, so that providers are reimbursed for keeping us healthy, not the number of tests they drive us through or put us through. And finally fourth, and perhaps most important, using technology to deliver health care the way all other businesses have utilized technology to deliver a product that allows them to be profitable.
If you designed the current system in Vermont from scratch and brought it in and said “we want a health care system and here it is,” people would think that you had lost your mind. It’s easy to criticize the existing system. It’s much harder to design a new one. That is a much bigger challenge than getting the waivers we need from Washington.
I believe if we design that system we can sell it. And I’m going to start working on that immediately, bringing people together to start the hard work to get it done. If we succeed, and if we also can design a system where health care is not a requirement of the employer, as well as the individual — it’s a huge job creator. It’s a huge national example of how to do health care right.
I think we have a real opportunity here. You know I was criticized during the campaign on this for making promises on this that I can’t keep. This is not a promise. It’s a commitment to a plan and we’re going to fight really hard to deliver on it.
Governor-elect Shumlin says the waivers are the easy part. Designing a single payer system is indeed hard work, particularly when we need to consider the transition from the multi-payer, money-driven, all-day disaster we have now.
But another part of the hard work is to see how our educational mission can help the people of Vermont. As the Governor-elect suggests, we find a welcome opportunity to set an “example of how to do health care right.”