I fully disclose I am a member of the GMCB advisory committee and have been since the GMCB’s beginning. I firmly believed, and still believe, in the GMCB and its mission, which has changed since its inception in 2011 under Act 48. The current difficulties Mr. Hildebrandt describes would be far worse in Vermont — worse than he could have ever imagined — had not the GMCB mitigated them.
First off, Mr. Hildebrant stated the GMCB was an “ambitious effort to control rising health care costs in Vermont.” The GMCB was actually created to govern a single-payer type system enacted by Act 48: Green Mountain Care. When ex-Governor Shumlin aborted implementation of that system, the GMCB was left to oversee a completely different system than originally intended.
Secondly, the problems that Mr. Hildebrant credits to the GMCB, like this year’s huge hospital and insurance rate hikes, are actually structural problems that go well beyond the GMCB’s purview and afflict the nation as a whole: profiteering, outrageous administrative costs and administrator salaries, proliferating middle-men, corporate monopolies, etc. No regulatory body on earth or in the heavens can “control rising health care costs” unless this robber-baron-like health care system is finally replaced by a publicly financed system.
Until then, the GMCB can only stand in the way of, and hold back, the current system’s insatiable demands for ever more amounts of our money.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier