Letters

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 […]

Seven Days To the Editor: I thank Seven Days for the excellent story on the University of Vermont Medical Center’s use of temporary nurses [“Health Care Premium,” November 3]. These extra millions spent on the temporary nurses come from our fee, premium and tax dollars. That money ought to support local doctors, nurses, staff and […]

VTDigger Many Vermonters don’t have access to affordable health care. Besides the uninsured, 36% of us are underinsured, meaning a serious health care problem would be a financial disaster. And yet the Legislature has studiously avoided discussion of structural reform or public financing. The Task Force on Affordable and Accessible Health Care talks about tweaking […]

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 […]