January 29, 2013; Andrew Stein; VTDigger
The Shumlin administration’s much-anticipated financing plan for a single-payer health care system landed on the desks of Vermont legislators Thursday evening.
Drawing from 2011 numbers, the study projects Vermont would save an estimated 1.5 percent annually on a roughly $6 billion health care finance system.
Taxpayer dollars would fund an estimated $1.61 billion of the system — an estimate that relies heavily on the assumption that federal revenues would rise as a result of increased enrollment in Medicaid, which some skeptics question.
The study’s conclusion is undercut by a caveat that the estimates might turn out to be invalid due to outdated numbers and shifting details surrounding the structure, slated for implementation in 2017. The report does, however, provide a general financing structure for plugging in new numbers.
What surprised many legislators was that the so-called plan, which was mandated by Act 48 in 2011, lacked a specific vehicle for how the public would pay for such a system.