The legislative session may have ended. But that doesn’t mean lawmakers’ work is complete. And six of the most influential legislators in Montpelier will be spending part of their summer and fall preparing for the push next year for a single-payer health plan.
In the waning days of the legislative session, leaders in the House and Senate added a small provision to the budget. The language calls for the formation of what will be known as the Health Care Reform Oversight Committee. The panel will be composed of the chairwomen and chairmen of some of the most powerful committees in Montpelier.
"It's just going to be really important for people to get ahead of things, and be meeting and talking and sort of understanding the same issues and sharing information, and I think that's what this is intended to do." -Rep. Janet Ancel, on a new health care oversight panel
“It’s just going to be really important for people to get ahead of things, and be meeting and talking and sort of understanding the same issues and sharing information, and I think that’s what this is intended to do,” says Calais Rep. Janet Ancel, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Ancel says she wants the new committee to spend time analyzing where health care dollars are coming from now, so it can better evaluate both the costs and financing options for whatever single-payer options the Shumlin Administration brings forth in the future.
“You can’t evaluate something unless you know what you’re comparing it to, and to me that’s going to be one of the big jobs that the Ways and Means Committee is going to have to tackle,” Ancel says.
Chittenden Sen. Tim Ashe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, says that with an undertaking as large and complex as single-payer, lawmakers can’t wait around until next year to begin formal deliberations.
“We’ll be asked to consider repackaging hundreds of millions of dollars of health care spending, so hopefully this commission can kind of keep the ball moving downfield, and preparing us so that it’s not unrealistic to make a decision in the next legislative year,” Ashe says.
Ashe says lawmakers will need to vet every aspect of the administration’s plan, and be mindful of how various financing mechanisms might jar different segments of the economy. For instance, Ashe says only a fraction of Vermont’s small employers actually provide health insurance benefits to their workers.
“So if we were to even consider a payroll tax of any size, we have to be mindful that that would be a sticker shock problem for the vast majority of small businesses,” Ashe says.
Ashe says the Health Care Reform Committee will serve as a kind of repository for information that will be analyzed and then disseminated to the Legislature as a whole. And if the Shumlin Administration has any hope of seeing its financing plan approved next year – the timeline favored by Gov. Peter Shumlin – then Ashe says the reform committee will need to see a preview of the financing plan before the beginning of the next session.
Shumlin has said he’ll unveil a formal financing plan early next year.
“I think if the administration doesn’t give us a preview, then it really calls into question how serious they’d be about us moving forward in 2015,” Ashe says.
The committee will include the chairs of the House and Senate tax and budget committees, as well as the chairs of the committees that oversee health care.
