Vermont’s plan for single payer healthcare FAILS

Good day all. While I was berating the Angry Systems Administrator for breaking the RSS feeds again, I saw this story pop up. It looks like the Socialist People’s Republic of Vermont has thrown in the towel on its plan to institute a single payer healthcare system.

The plan, called Green Mountain Care, was enacted in 2011 and was meant to be a socialists dream of a single payer system. The problem was, the numbers simply didn’t work. Finally, Comrade Governor Shumlin threw in the towel. Here are some of the details from Politico:

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin on Wednesday dropped his plan to enact a single-payer health care system in his state — a plan that had won praise from liberals but never really got much past the framework stage. “This is not the right time” for enacting single payer, Shumlin said in a statement, citing the big tax increases that would be required to pay for it.

Big tax increases? Try virtual confiscation levels of taxation to pay for this disaster in waiting.

Shumlin faced deep skepticism that lawmakers could agree on a way to pay for his ambitious goal and that the feds would agree to everything he needed to create the first state-based single-payer system in 2017.

That was another major issue, thinking that the Federal Government would pay for Vermont’s socialist experiments. You would think the Governor would have paid attention to the resistance to Obamacare. Being a typical delusional moonbat, he didn’t and almost paid the proce for it.

And that was all before Shumlin, a Democrat, almost lost reelection last month in one of the country’s most liberal states. And it was before MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the now notorious Obamacare consultant who also advised Vermont until his $400,000 contract was killed amid the controversy, became political poison.

Oh, did I mention that Jonathon “Schickel” Gruber was heavily involved in Green Mountain Care? I didn’t? Silly me. Then there was the problem of Shumlin not meeting deadlines on how this mess was going to be paid for.

Shumlin had missed two earlier financing deadlines but finally released his proposal. But he immediately cast it as “detrimental to Vermonters.”

And why did he cast this as “Detrimental to Vermonters?” Could it be that the taxes to pay for it would have been ruinous?

The model called for businesses to take on a double-digit payroll tax, while individuals would face up to a 9.5 percent premium assessment. Big businesses, in particular, didn’t want to pay for Shumlin’s plan while maintaining their own employee health plans.

And would you care to guess just how many of these companies would relocate out of Vermont if those taxes were imposed? Try just about all of them. Heck, I wouldn’t have been surprised if those two socialist founders of Ben&Jerry’s ice cream didn’t pull up stakes and move to New Hampshire. (They have not been invited to Texas according to rumors) In remarks on giving up on this monstrosity, Governor Shumlin said:

“These are simply not tax rates that I can responsibly support or urge the Legislature to pass,” the governor said. “In my judgment, the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families and the state’s economy.”

I think he couldn’t support the massive tax reasons for a few reasons. First, as I just wrote, there would be an exodus of business from the state that would surpass those now fleeing California. Then there was the odds of this getting through the legislature. Finally, Shumlin and others probably had personal self preservation in their minds. If they rammed this through, the odds are someone would have take a shot at him. Best of all? This wasn’t a pure single payer system to begin with.

And that was for a plan that would not be truly single payer. Large companies with self-insured plans regulated by ERISA would have been exempt. And Medicare also would have operated separately, unless the state got a waiver, which was a long shot.

Yep, it wasn’t a true single payer system. That would have canceled all other health insurance plans and forced everyone into the Green Mountain No Care system. After the Obamacare debacle, and the outright lies by Der Fubar, (Such as “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” and that golden oldy, “If you like your doctor, you can keep him.”), I suspect that Shumlin realized that this thing would collapse faster then Obamacare is collapsing. Needless to say, the “Usual Suspects” are up in arms over Shumlin’s bow to fiscal reality.

Advocates of a single-payer plan said Shumlin should not be able to cast aside Act 48, the 2011 law that called for the creation of Green Mountain Care, without repealing it. A group planned to hold a rally in front of the statehouse on Thursday to protest his decision.

Oh joy, the Smelly Hippies put in an appearance.

“The governor’s misguided decision was a completely unnecessary result of a failed policy calculation that he pursued without Democratic input,” the group Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign said in a statement.

Oh I like this. Healthcare is a human right? Since when? I wonder if those stinky hippies have ever looked into the history of medicine? I wonder if they ever heard of a physician named Galen? ((Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus)) What are their solutions to those people who don’t live anywhere near a doctor or a nurse? You know, places like Borneo or Africa? And other then saying the governor can’t do math, these hippies just mouth platitudes and then take another hit off the community bong.

The problem with any and all government healthcare system is that it doesn’t work. All you need to do is look towards the British National Health Service or the Canadian system. Both systems are poorly run, all but bankrupt and ration medical care. People literally go into NHS run hospitals and died of dehydration because the nurses couldn’t be bothered to actually do their jobs.

While there are issues with the current healthcare system, putting it under centralized government control is not the solution. Governor Shumlin has faced reality, to some extent, and has given up on the plan to institute a socialist healthcare system in Vermont. Now all we need to do is kill Obamacare off once and for all and start all over and build a system that minimizes government control.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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