Letters

The Caledonian Record The report that St. Johnsbury’s Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital is cutting staff and programs  continues a dangerous trend across the state. Services that the community needs, like obstetrics and in-patient psychiatric care, get closed because we don’t finance hospitals based on community needs and with public financing. So they end programs that […]

St.Albans Messenger Emerson Lynn is correct when he states that potential cuts to Medicaid will be a disaster for our hospital system that is already in crisis (see 6-20-25 editorial).  It’s true that our legislature has recently passed a bill that attempts to rein in hospital prices by pegging them to Medicare rates and has […]

Valley Post By Eisha Williams The following article is by some of the 520 workers at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital; they e-mailed this article to the Valley Post on June 25: Earlier this year, the 325 ancillary staff at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital (BMH) proudly voted to form our union, Brattleboro Healthcare United. Despite BMH management spending […]

Addison Independent At 2:01 Thursday morning, June 5th, our 59 year old sister-in-law/sister died from an aggressive cancer, 11 months after her diagnosis. She had worked hard for almost 40 years and had savings and owned her own home. However, when she could no longer work, she had to pay for COBRA insurance at a […]

VTDigger To the Editor, In the latest outrageous Vermont health care news, we learn that Vermont hospitals are marking up outpatient drugs to an average of more than 500% of the manufacturer’s price (and in one case nearly 70 times the manufacturer’s price) — the highest markup in the nation. This is one of several […]

Bennington Banner Our healthcare “system” operates via a Byzantine system of price hikes, price discounts, different pricing for different customers, and an immense web of middlemen who operate it all. The complexity and the middlemen will always keep prices higher than they otherwise would be. Always. Our irrational system causes immense personal harm and misery, […]

Seven Days Thanks to Seven Days for [“Code Red,” May 7], on how the state’s health care leaders are scrambling to prevent another colossal insurance hike in rates or the implosion of the state’s health care system. It is excessively telling and sad that Rep. Alyssa Black (D-Essex), chair of the House Health Care Committee, […]

VTDigger Dear Editor, The recent VTDigger article about the financial struggles of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont was déjà vu. It reminded me of another time in the past when we were at this point where Blue Cross Blue Shield was petitioning the Green Mountain Care Board for huge rate increases to prevent their […]

Morrisville News and Citizen To the Editor: I thank Rep. Dave Yacovone for his recent commentary (“There is no quick fix to solve health care problems,” Feb. 27, 2025). Rep. Yacovone details how our ailing healthcare system is failing so badly. To quote Rep. Yacovone, “To say that the health care system is unraveling is […]

Caledonian Record To the Editor: America’s current obsession with efficiency is absurd when you look at American healthcare. It is the epitome of inefficiency and it accounts for more than 17% of national GDP [https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/historical]. In Vermont, our 2019 healthcare cost of $6.5 billion [https://vtdigger.org/2021/05/12/vermonters-spent-6-5-billion-on-health-care-in-2019/] accounted for roughly 18.5% of VT’s 2019 GDP of $35 […]