Letters

Burlington Free Press In his Feb. 1 My Turn, Joseph P Blanchette’s Fatal conceit is that health and its unfortunate partner, illness, don’t abide by free market principles in a just society. Under free market principles, profit and fortune amass and the nonprofitable goods disappear as competition thrives. In the healthcare field, the goods, however, […]

Burlington Free Press I am excited about Gov. Shumlin’s proposed health care bill, H.202. For too long, our country has embraced a corrupt system that benefits insurance and pharmaceutical companies while leaving people to face insurmountable costs to accessing health care. It is a crime for large corporations to profit off of even a single […]

Burlington Free Press: Comment & Debate Deborah Richter, President, Vermont Health Care for All Praise has been heaped on the 120-some page report issued by the Harvard health economist, William Hsiao, and his working group. Words like historic, ground-breaking, and masterful are used, and since I entirely agree I will put them to use as […]

Boston Globe I APPLAUD The Globe for showcasing Vermont’s single-payer “laboratory’’ in its Jan. 2 editorial “Vermont: Creating a singular health system.’’ As a third-year medical student at Cambridge Health Alliance, I’ve found that it doesn’t take long to see that the current system is insufficient. The shortcomings leave patients whom I follow longitudinally with […]

Burlington Free Press On Dec. 10, I heard Sen. Sanders, during a filibuster in opposition to the Obama-Republican tax bill, read letters he had received from Americans. Each one told a story of hardship and struggle to make ends meet. One person was a part time worker in Stowe who related that his hours had […]

Burlington Free Press Even though the United States is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose anniversary we observed this Dec. 10, it still treats health care as a commodity instead of a human right. Everyone needs health care, regardless of their lifestyle. In particular, everyone needs primary and preventive care, which […]

Burlington Free Press  I am writing to you on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here in Vermont we still do not yet have the right to health care even though every other industrialized country recognizes healthcare as a human right. Everyone should be entitled to receive the health care […]

Burlington Free Press Senate bill S. 88 clearly states that the commission shall consist of no members with a relationship to health providers or insurers. Jim Leddy as president of AARP Vermont obviously has such a relationship, volunteer or not. Since one of the designs mandated in S. 88 is a single-payer-type health care plan, […]

Rutland Herald Although Jim Leddy, the representative of the AARP members to the national organization, is a principled man, one question not yet answered is “Why appoint him?” AARP is a billion-dollar-a-year business, with $600 million of its revenue generated by merchandising — and AARP gets 10 percent on the premiums it generates through policy […]

Shap Smith’s appointment against the law (RH) Naming Leddy violates law Shap Smith, speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives and a lawyer practicing in Burlington, is not above the law and therefore will need to rescind his appointment of Jim Leddy, president of AARP in Vermont, a health insurer, to the state’s Health Care […]