News

 Vermont Digger: Vermont’s largest hospital network and its largest health insurer both say they are on board with Gov. Peter Shumlin’s health reform proposal, which will rely on their support. Shumlin wants to levy a 0.7 percent payroll tax to raise $92 million to pay for the package, which — along with a slew of […]

Shumlin reverses course on health recordsBy DAVE GRAMThe Associated Press MONTPELIER — Gov. Peter Shumlin has reversed course and is withholding from the media some of the documents that helped shape his decision to shelve his push for a single-payer health care plan. When he announced last month that he was dropping the main goal […]

Rutland Herald: MONTPELIER — A sentiment is brewing inside the State House that protests staged there this week may have hurt the cause they were hoping to boost. The Vermont Workers’ Center organized protests Thursday during the inaugural ceremony for Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. Hundreds of supporters of a single-payer health care system sang, chanted […]

 Vermont Digger: Last week’s pro-universal health care demonstration during Gov. Peter Shumlin’s inaugural address drew attention locally and nationally, and left many wanting to know more about its organizers — the Vermont Workers’ Center, which has grown substantially in the past five years. Founded nearly two decades ago as Central Vermonters for a Livable Wage, the […]

Vermont Digger: The single payer advocacy group Vermont Leads says the state could still implement a publicly financed universal health care program in the next three to four years. New elements of the Affordable Care Act will continue to change the health insurance market in ways that will increase the public’s appetite for a sweeping […]

 Vermont Digger: Editor’s note: This commentary is by Lawrence Miller, Robin Lunge and Michael Costa, chief, director and deputy director respectively of Health Care Reform for the Shumlin administration. The decision to not move forward with a public financing system for health care in Vermont was an incredibly difficult one and it was not taken lightly. […]

 Valley News:  “Missed it by that much.” With that exclamation, secret agent Maxwell Smart, the hero of the 1970s television comedy Get Smart, would shrug and seek to placate his skeptical boss in the wake of a comical misassessment of the facts and situation at hand.Substitute Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin for Smart, and Vermont’s voters […]

 WPTV News Channel 5:  MONTPELIER, Vt. —They sang, they screamed, and they sat in silence on the floor of the statehouse for hours. In all, 29 people were forced out by police Thursday night. One day later, the focus is on what kind of impact, if any, the demonstration will have on any revival of […]

Modern Healthcare: Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin stunned the healthcare policy world last week when he announced the state was scrapping plans to create a single-payer system. The state said the economics didn’t work, but not everyone is convinced. “This is all politics,” said Gerald Friedman, a healthcare economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. […]

Valley News: The push for health care reform in Vermont entered a new phase last week, when Gov. Peter Shumlin announced that he would abandon his attempt to design a system that used broad-based taxes and other public sources to replace premiums paid by employers and employees. The sticker shock of the necessary taxes and […]