Seven Days

By: Chuck Gregory, Springfield
 

Paul Heintz’s financial update of Vermont’s advance toward a humane and rational health care system in Vermont [Fair Game, February 26] had the focus of a drunkard on his next bottle. Had he viewed the scene more broadly, he would have seen it as farce.

• Spokeswoman Darcie Johnston of Vermonters for Morbidity and Mortality Freedom darkly inveighs against "big, out-of-state" union funding while she sits on her own list of dark money mega-donors.

• Fearing that she will make their policyholders angry — not at her but at an industry that excludes their pre-existing conditions, rescinds and denies payments whenever possible, dictates treatments to providers, and sheds the sickest policyholders in the name of profit — Rep. Janet Ancel kills the notion of a tax increase.  

• Gov. Shumlin at the age of 6 sent to bed without supper for asking, "Can’t progressive taxation be a good thing?"

• The Democratic and Progressive legislators check their spines with the sergeant at arms as they leave for home to tell the voters, "Yeah, health care for people who need it was a stupid idea; we didn’t know what we were thinking. You don’t deserve it, and we’re voting for the Republican plan."

• The Vermont Republican party’s freshly picked candidates, well-spoken, personable and poised to replace their now-spineless opponents, craft a one-size-fits-all plan for the 78 percent of voters who want health care for everybody: True to the national party’s spirit, the plan consists of one word: "No."