VTDigger

Vermont Democratic Party Press Release
Jesse Bragg

Recently, the conservative anti-health care reform group, “Vermonters for Health Care Freedom”, underwent a change of leadership when its Director, Republican operative Darcy Johnson, came clean and decided to dedicate her efforts overtly to Republican Randy Brock’s bid to become Governor of Vermont. Taking Ms. Johnson’s place is Jeff Wennberg. Unfortunately, rather than taking the opportunity to change direction and advance the ongoing dialogue about how to improve the delivery of health care in Vermont, Mr. Wennberg offers more of the same tired and misleading complaints Republicans have continually lobbed at Vermonters’ efforts to fix a system everyone acknowledges is broken.

In an interview on WCAX TV, Mr. Wennberg acknowledged he was completely uninvolved in health care issues before accepting his paid position with “Vermonters for Health Care Freedom” and openly admitted his lack of expertise on issues involving health care. Mr. Wennberg proceeded to only offer criticisms and failed to offer any viable solutions to fixing our broken health care system. On WCAX and again in an editorial published on April 2, 2012, Mr.Wennberg advocates for an “Indiana”-type plan. Unfortunately, Mr. Wennberg does not disclose what this is or how it would work. However, what we do know about health care under the “Indiana” plan is this:

There are over half a million people in Indiana who do not have health insurance.

Indiana has one of the highest per capita bankruptcy filing rates in the nation. Research estimates that half of all personal bankruptcies in the US are due to medical debt. 

Women in Indiana receive both mammograms and pap smears at lower rates than the national average. 

66% of Hoosier men age 50 and older did not have a colonoscopy in the last 5 years. This is six percent more than the national average. 

Indiana ranks 2nd nationally in the percentage of adults who are smokers; over 27% of Hoosier adults are smokers,which is 6.6% higher than the national average. 

Almost 60% of Hoosier adults are obese, and Indiana ranks 10th nationally in percentage of adults who are overweight/obese.

(Source:http://www.in.gov/fssa/hip/2337.htm) 

This is all true despite the implementation of a program in Indiana designed to provide insurance to only the lowest income people. The program places those below 200% of the federal poverty level into high deductible health care plans. In order to qualifyfor this program, you must 1) not have had insurance for at least six months; 2) not have access to insurance through your employer; 3) not be eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, be between 19 and 64 years old; 4) and make less than 200% of the federal poverty level. That means if you make more that $23,000 a year, you wouldn’t qualify for assistance from this plan. (Source: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml#guidelines)

Even the government of Indiana itself acknowledges “Hoosiers fall short when it comes to getting their requisite preventive care. They also face many health challenges, which make us an expensive population to insure.” (Source: http://www.in.gov/fssa/hip/2337.htm). Indeed, Indiana acknowledges that its system is a failure: “The high cost of health care limits Indiana’s economic development efforts as many companies find the price of doing business here too great. This restricts the economic growth of current Hoosier businesses and discourages prevent new businesses from coming to Indiana.”

Clearly, Vermonters for Health Care Freedom is not interested in offering viable solutions and seems wholly focusedon politicizing the issue in order to maintain the status quo, where Vermonters’ dollars go to lining insurance executives pockets instead of towards making Vermonters healthy. All this raises the question of whether the motivation of this group is truly to advance an informed debate on health care or, as seems increasingly clear, to serve as a shadow organization formed to advocate the advancement of the Republican agenda. Vermonters for Health Care Freedom openly advocate the Republican mantra that government should not be an instrument for providing the greatest good to the greatest number and itis clear the professed motivations of this organization are nothing but a thinly disguised ruse designed to hide its true political agenda.
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