The New York Times has an unflinching look at the problems with ObamaCare in Vermont:
Despite an eventual cost of up to $200 million in federal funds, its online marketplace, or exchange, is still not fully functional, while disgust with the system is running deep among residents and lawmakers alike....
The bitterness stems partly from the fact that Vermont had some of the biggest elements of the Affordable Care Act in place long before it took effect. Health insurance companies here already could not refuse to cover people, or charge them more, if they had pre-existing medical conditions. The state also already had more generous Medicaid eligibility rules than most, and programs that helped lower-income people pay for private insurance, which made it less expensive for many than the new exchange plans.
To many Vermonters, the new federal law complicated a state system that had already provided good coverage and muddied the route to an even better model....Under the single-payer law that the Vermont Legislature passed in 2011, the state was to seek a waiver in 2017 to trade its insurance exchange for the government-run system. Most of its 625,000 residents would be eligible for a uniform package of benefits under that system, which would be financed with a mix of state and federal funds.
But [Democratic Governor] Shumlin and his advisers concluded the plan would require "enormous" new taxes, including an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all Vermont businesses and a sliding-scale income tax of up to 9.5 percent. In all, he said when he announced that he was shelving it, the plan would require about $2.5 billion in additional revenue in its first year, in a state that raises only about $2.7 billion in taxes annually.
It almost sounds as if the state would have been better off if the ObamaCare law hadn't passed. Link via the dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier.
