Bill Schubart’s excellent commentary “It’s past time to rethink how Vermont health care is evolving” shows how much we lost when then-Gov. Shumlin killed Act 48, our universal health care program. When he and the Democrats abandoned Act 48 back in December 2014, shortly after Shumlin nearly lost an election that he should have won by a landslide, they gave up the opportunity to “rethink how Vermont health care is evolving.”
Because they threw away the one real opportunity to accomplish this rethinking, we remain mired in a health system that has kept robbing us through all the years since Act 48’s demise. Now we face our hospitals asking the Green Mountain Care Board to grant them double-digit increases of 18% to 20% and maybe more.
Mr. Schubart said, “We must make choices about what matters in our society.” You can see what matters to our society from the choices we have made to date. Not even in health care do we value human health and well-being over ideology and money. Humanity is not relevant.
We have accepted human misery as the price of keeping taxes low for the wealthy and generating positive cash flow for the few — absurd CEO salaries, high stock prices, etc.
To really rethink Vermont’s health care, we must first decide what we value more: dollars or humanity. Vermont seems unwilling to face that decision.
Lodiza LePore
Bennington