Letters

VTDigger I want to compliment John Steen (Commentary: “Medicare Advantage is a disadvantage”) in sharing these facts and pointing out another ripoff of the taxpayers and people buying into this. It is projected that 70% of Medicare-eligible people will be in these very lucrative — for insurance companies — programs in the next five years. […]

VTDigger Anya Radar Wallack’s “What on earth are they doing at UVM Health Network?” left me with two impressions. I doubt Ms. Wallack intended either with her commentary. The first was that Ms. Wallack’s honesty about a “really messed up American health care system” is itself part of a strategy. Wendell Potter, former corporate communications […]

VTDigger Consistent with the trend of hospital administrators’ compensation vastly outgrowing provider pay, like Al Gobeille and Corey Gustafson before her, Anya Rader Wallack leaves her many years as a former regulator of the UVM Health Network to feed at the trough with it. Just as Gobeille and Gustafson, she possesses no actual health care […]

VTDigger Bill Schubart’s very powerful column about the implosion of Vermont’s health care system is right on the mark. He deplores the consolidation of health care monopoly in this state and the associated decline in the ability of actual Vermonters to afford and access health care services. He points to “an acquisition strategy that consolidates […]

VTDigger Many thanks to Bill Schubart for cogently chronicling the many different ways that Vermont’s health care is sliding toward disaster (“The slow-motion implosion of Vermont’s health care system”). We are now well on our way toward a health care monopoly in the hands of the University of Vermont Medical Center and its affiliated “ACO,” […]

Seven Days [Re “The Doctor Won’t See You Now,” September 1]: Waiting for 10 months? Of course, that’s outrageous when it comes to health care, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. Our country as a whole has the disease, and it won’t be cured with natural foods or lotus positions or seven social workers posing as therapists. […]

Seven Days [Re ” The Doctor Won’t See You Now,” September 1]: Seven Days‘ coverage of wait times at the University of Vermont Medical Center left me horrified by the misery and frustration of the many patients unable to get health care when it was urgently needed. It seems that this horror story results, in […]

VTDigger The Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropic foundation, has recently published another report on our health care system, and it doesn’t look good. The United States ranked dead last when compared to 10 other high-income countries. The study looked at access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. Dead last! It is […]

Seven Days I thank Seven Days for the story about wait times at the University of Vermont Medical Center [” The Doctor Won’t See You Now,” September 1]. It is interesting that Green Mountain Care Board member Jessica Holmes was so “discouraged” by the wait times that even she, a regulator of the system, “sought […]

VTDigger Julie Wasserman recently laid out a wise series of questions that we should be asking in assessing Vermont’s current healthcare reform efforts.  Among them: “What portion of school budget increases are attributable to the rising cost of health care?” Good question.  But why limit it school budgets?  Healthcare costs also contribute to budgets for […]