I thank the chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, Owen Foster, and his fellow board members for subpoening OneCare on the matter of OneCare’s executive compensation. As Foster wrote in the subpoena, the accountable care organization’s attempts to “block transparency and regulatory review of how it utilizes Vermont taxpayer and insurance ratepayer funds to compensate its executives is unacceptable.”
If I were in Foster’s position, I probably would have employed those very words or similiar ones. OneCare’s refusal to divulge what it pays its CEOs is “unacceptable,” especially as our health care costs keep climbing so dramatically as our access to care gets worse and worse since OneCare and its “value-based care” was forced on us as health care reform during the Shumlin reign.
These higher costs are, of course, shouldered by Vermont insurance and taxpayers, most earning far less than the OneCare CEOs. It is disgraceful that our state Supreme Court and our Legislature have so far backed OneCare’s effort to avoid transparency in this regard.
It is probably a safe bet to assert that most Vermonters don’t know or care that OneCare is the state’s only accountable care organization or what an ACO is in the first place. It is long past time to see if OneCare has become just another welfare program for CEOs, like so much of our “health care industry” is now.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier