By Art Edelstein
Vermont Business Magazine
Brattleboro
Jun 2009. Vol. 37, Iss. 7; pg. 46
Dr Deborah Richter, a Cambridge-based family practice physician, is also chair of Vermont Health Care For All, a group advocating for publicly financed universal health care system, also known as single payer.
“Every single study of single payer has shown we can cover every Vermonter with comprehensive coverage for less money then we are spending in total now,” she argues.
She points to a bill in the US Senate sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders that will allow states to serve as labs with their own universal health care systems.
“Bernie wants to have Vermont be first state for publicly financed health care,” she said, noting that this bill is “the most fiscally conservative model being proposed.”
Single payer, asserts Richter, “eliminates an entrenched entity. Insurance companies are not needed under this model. They are obsolete.”
According to her, “they no longer protect us from bankruptcy and to get the care we need, and they create enormous bureaucracy, but are very powerful and influential in Congress.”
Some doctors, she notes, are not in favor of single payer. “The specialists running the AMA, are against this as they are doing quite well financially as it is.”
Physicians won’t be leaders in this issue, she says, because people doing well in the status quo fight to keep it the way it is.
She sees single payer as helping to “create an enormous economic stimulus because middle class families will have more money in their budgets.”
Currently, she explained, “Vermonters pay every single penny of the health care dollar which is now $4.8 billion from either out of pocket expenses, premiums, or taxes, which all add up to the total.”
These expenses, she says, are adversely affecting business and the middle class.
“If we progressively financed health care we could inject an enormous economic stimulus into the economy. We would have to find the fairest taxes to pay for health care.”
The recent declaration by national insurance companies and some business groups to reduce costs does not get raves from Richter. “Who’s going to hold them accountable for cost cutting, its non binding?
“I don’t think it will do any good. You need to turn it into a German system with multiple payers, they are not for profit.”
But to do that, she believes “it would take all the fun out of it for insurance companies and they won’t go for that.”
Richter sees the solution in establishing “a global budget for the whole health care system with uniform reimbursements for hospitals and physicians and drug uniformity and new health planning.”
Richter calls Catamount Health, the state’s attempt to insure all Vermonters, “a fancy band aid not working.” She says the program “is costing us more, and most can’t afford the premiums. It would have been cheaper for taxpayers to pay directly for the care these people receive.”
Copyright Boutin-McQuiston, Inc. Jun 2009