In answer to Gov. Phil Scott’s “Move Vermont healthcare policies back into the mainstream” commentary (Times Argus, July 31), I want to ask what Governor Scott means by the “mainstream.”
As he, and we, very well know, a publicly financed healthcare system is the “mainstream” in the rest of the democratic world. We are the pariahs, insisting our system serve wealth before it serves patients.
The governor points to the failure of Vermont’s 2014 single-payer effort as proof that universal public financing doesn’t work. This is disingenuous. It just proved our extreme lack of political will to do it.
Our problem is not that we have too few insurance “plans” to choose from. It is that private insurers and hospital systems skim off billions of our healthcare dollars nationally (millions in Vermont) in administrative costs, marketing, huge executive compensations and profits, while forcing patients and providers to navigate intricate mazes of networks, prior authorizations, denials and appeals.
Adding more “choices” does not remove these costs — it increases them. We have irrefutable proof of this, even in our own publicly-financed systems — Medicare, Medicaid, the VA — which cost far less overall to serve far more people at this far lesser cost than any mishmash of private insurance “choices.”
Gov. Scott says we should judge healthcare policy by its results. He does not have to face these results. We do. We should remember this in the voting booth.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier