Consumer-driven health care advocate Sally Pipes writes in a Washington Examiner column about Vermont’s latest excursion into government control of the health care market.
Here’s what is really happening in Vermont. This bill, in conjunction with health care provisions in Gov. Peter Shumlin’s budget, is an attempt to comply with Obamacare’s dictate that every state has an exchange at the same time it cleans up its last failed attempt at government health care by shifting the few folks left on the much-heralded Catamount Care to Medicaid. This also sends the bill to federal taxpayers and Vermont’s doctors and hospitals.
Vermont legislators passed Catamount Care in 2006 to much acclaim. Health policy guru Kenneth E. Thorpe, claimed in a Health Affairs article that this plan would serve as a model for state-based health reform.
It was supposed to meet the demand for affordable, guaranteed-issue health care, leading to near-universal coverage by 2010. It failed. Catamount Care enrollment is a mere 12,000 — perhaps, because it requires people to pay. The average monthly premium is $527.
Instead of accurately declaring Catamount Care a failure and putting it in the company of other expensive state disasters such as Tennessee’s TennCare, Maine’s DirigoChoice, and ultimately Massachusetts’ Romneycare, the law puts the focus on a utopian dream of health care for everyone with the bill being paid by no one.
The reality is that Vermont’s doctors and hospitals will pay the bill. Medicaid reimburses at 79 percent of Medicare payments. Private insurance reimburses at 125 to 135 percent of Medicare.
Catamount Care reimbursed at 110 percent of Medicare, the deal politicians cut to get the providers to agree with the plan. By shutting it down and moving all enrollees to Medicaid, the government is breaking the deal with doctors and shifting the costs onto them. According to the Vermont Medical Society, only 44 percent of physicians practicing internal medicine accept new Medicaid patients.
Vermont’s new bill will move the state to a government-run health care system, but it’s not the utopian one advertised by today’s politicians. It’s called Medicaid, a near-perfect embodiment of government in action.
It’s a federal-state program that overpromises and underdelivers, a program in which everything is free at the point of consumption but nothing much of value is available — at least not without a long, hard wait.
