If it can’t work in one of the smallest states, it can’t work nationally.
In 2011, state lawmakers tried to implement a single-payer system called Green Mountain Care (GMC) but were forced to abandon the experiment in 2015 when they realized it would require a more than 150% hike in the state’s income tax rate. Then Governor Peter Shumlin’s Administration found that spending would balloon from $2 billion to $2.6 billion in 2017 and $3.2 billion by 2021. Yet the program would run deficits by 2020, thereby requiring even more taxes.
Mismanagement and wasteful spending – inevitable with government-run programs and regardless of state budget size or political party in power – make cost containment further elusive. For example, Vermont’s chronically dysfunctional health exchange website, Vermont Health Connect, has cost $300 million in taxpayer monies.
Honest number crunching sealed Green Mountain Care’s fate and offers a moral to the other states in the union – Vermont failed so you don’t have to.
The inability to curtail the cost of Green Mountain Care predicted the astronomical price tag of ‘Medicare for all’ at $32 trillion in taxpayer funds. Vermont’s ill-fated tryst emphasizes the need to educate the American people that universal Medicare, or any proposed version of a single-payer system, can only deliver ruinous results on our economy and jeopardize the quality of and access to health care.