Letters

VTDigger When you opt for Medicare Advantage instead of traditional Medicare, you place decisions about your health in the hands of an insurance company intent on making a profit. Three-quarters of the Medicare Advantage business is currently in the hands of six huge insurers: Humana, CVS, Anthem, Kaiser Permanente, Centene, and Cigna. Because of the […]

VTDigger I again thank Bill Schubart for another of his incisive commentaries about our health care mess (“Health care is a self-driving truck with no GPS). Yet, this self-driving truck definitely has a GPS. It is guiding us backward instead of forward, while trying to make it look like we’re moving ahead. It seems to […]

Bennington Banner You probably have seen Joe Namath on television hawking Medicare Advantage plans. Don’t be fooled! Joe was a decent quarterback, but a health insurance expert, he is not. Right now, there are two versions of Medicare: Original (federal) and Advantage (commercial). In addition, there is a new program called REACH which can switch […]

VTDigger Medicare Advantage is a misnomer You probably have seen Joe Namath on television hawking Medicare Advantage plans. Don’t be fooled! Joe was a decent quarterback, but a health insurance expert, he is not. Right now, there are two versions of Medicare: Original (federal) and Advantage (commercial). In addition, there is a new program called […]

Caledonian Record To the Editor: The Green Mountain Care Board publishes an annual list of Vermont hospital employees whose annual compensation tops $500,000. The list for Fiscal Year 2020 shows a total of 59 hospital execs making more than half a million dollars a year. Fifty-nine. Eleven of them work at Rutland hospital. Thirteen work […]

Addison Independent To the Editor: Thank you for the March 24 editorial and Christopher Ross’s article about ever-rising healthcare costs. Advocates of publicly-funded universal healthcare have not lost interest, as Angelo Lynn suggests. They will never stop working to establish healthcare as a human right, as it is in every other prosperous modern democracy, where […]

Seven Days To the Editor: [Re “Projecting Millions in Losses, Vermont’s Largest Hospitals Ask for Rate Increases,” March 18, online]: So what else is new? Health care costs keep rising. Primary care doctors and nurses are in short supply, overworked and underpaid. There is nowhere for new recruits to live. We must rely on travel […]

VTDigger I have five different insurances for my family of three. They’re all aggravating, but Vermont Health Connect is the worst. After applying for my wife last July and being denied subsidies under an arcane rule whereby we were assessed as individuals rather than family, I reapplied last November, as our situation had changed due […]

Seven Days The rapid disappearance of independent doctors in Vermont [“The Doctor Is Out,” December 8], especially from rural areas, should worry us all. To me, there is a simple solution to the problem of rural health care’s financial woes and the loss of independent physician practices: a publicly funded universal health care program — […]

Times Argus We recently learned the federal government has notified the state of Vermont that the enrollment targets for all-payer model (and thus, OneCare) are “unattainable” and “unnecessary.” This is an entirely new way to set standards. Imagine if a professor or teacher tells her students they need to write three papers, then decides it […]