Editorials

VTDigger This commentary is by Judy K. Orton, M.D., whose practice is at Green Mountain Pediatrics in Bennington. I have been a solo, independent pediatrician for 32 years at Green Mountain Pediatrics, located in Bennington. I have always strived to use best practices with some healthy common sense in the care of my kids. I […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Rob Hoffman of Quechee. The Green Mountain Care Board is presently deliberating over the 2022 annual budget submission for Vermont’s all-payer model accountable care organization, OneCare Vermont — whose parent company is the University of Vermont Health Network. OneCare has been tasked as the all-payer model’s partner with existential importance. […]

VTDigger This commentary is by John Steen of South Burlington, who, before he retired, was a teacher of philosophy, had a 20-year career in health planning, health regulation and public health, was a professor of health policy, and is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association. I am responding to a commentary in […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Jane Katz Field, M.D., a retired pediatrician who practiced in Brattleboro. She is vice president of the Vermont chapter Physicians for a National Health Program. She lives in Putney. The Medicare annual enrollment period starts Oct. 15, which means people over 65 will be inundated with ads encouraging them to […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Fred Jagels, who operates Evergreen Economic Research in Cabot, Vt., specializing in those parts of the economy that economists ignore. Like so many other knotty problems we face today, economists are on one planet while the planet we all actually occupy has evolved away from what economists learned in grad […]

VTDigger The oldest exposed reef fossils in the world lie in Isle LaMotte, Vermont, where they came to rest 480 million years ago after one of the most violent tectonic plate shifts the Earth’s surface ever experienced. The fossils originated in Africa. A less violent but equally destructive disruption is occurring in health care. Here […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Peter Wilhelm, M.D., a family doctor at Middlebury Family Health, and a board member of Health First, Vermont’s independent practice association, representing health care practitioners working at physician-owned practices throughout the state. As many recent contributors have pointed out, Vermonters have seen significant increases in health care costs in the […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Marvin Malek, M.D., who also holds a master’s degree in public health and is an internist/hospitalist at Springfield (Vt.) Hospital. This week brought two milestones in the Covid pandemic:The Covid death toll in the U.S. reached 688,000. 675,000 is the best estimate of the number of U.S. deaths that occurred […]

VTDigger This commentary is from Marvin Klikunas, M.D., whose medical practice is in Williston. As I write this commentary, the seven-day rolling average of daily Covid cases in Vermont is 209. Even during the depths of last winter, before a vaccine was available, the daily average as plotted in VTDigger never reached 200. Forty-eight people […]

VTDigger This commentary is by Patrick Flood, former commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living, and former deputy secretary of the Agency of Human Services. He is now retired and lives in Woodbury. Recently there has been a lot of press coverage of a Centers for […]