Vermont Poised to Become 1st State to Enact Single-Payer Healthcare
Dr. Deb Richter, president of Vermont Health Care for All.
Gov. Shumlin calls her the “backbone” of the grassroots effort that helped persuade the Democratic-led state legislature to pass the bill this spring.
“…we’ve had struggles up ’til this point, and no one said we could get this far, and people were basically naysayers saying that you’ll never get this far. And we’ve gotten this far. And I think the same energy that got us this far—we have a congressional delegation that is superb. We have a wonderful legislature; at this point, they’re all in—most of—the majority are in favor of single payer. And, of course, we have our governor, who campaigned on this issue, and a strong grassroots movement in the state of Vermont. And all of those together are really going to be needed to get us to where we need to go in 2017, or hopefully 2014.”
“…in Buffalo, 40 percent of my patients had no insurance, and many of them died young as a result of preventable illnesses, as a result of having been on and off insurance. And I had dozens of examples that—from my own practice, just me—if you multiply that times 700,000, you get an idea of how widespread this problem was.
And in addition, the amount of administrative burden and all of the bureaucracy that was—I’m a primary care physician, and all of the bureaucracy that we had—the hoops we had to jump through just to get patients the care they needed was ridiculous. And we know that 31 percent of the healthcare dollar is spent on administrative costs, transaction costs and paperwork. And just ask any primary care doctor, and they can tell you that they actually live that every single day.
So those are the things that I think resonated with people. I think people who had gone to the doctor 30 years ago and didn’t see all those people behind the counter just pushing paper, it’s something that they all felt. And we’re seeing this. More and more in the middle class is now experiencing what the poorer folks used to experience in terms of access. And I think that now that we have probably a majority of the population experiencing problems, this is something that’s resonating. And I do believe that that’s one of the major reasons that we got this legislation passed this year.”
“…there was a public hearing for providers. This was—included hospitals. And what we found was, two to one were in favor of single payer. And that’s particularly true in the primary care specialty. Eighty percent, roughly 80 percent nationally and in other state polls have shown that primary care, 80 percent of them are in favor. And we—our American Academy of Family Physicians Vermont chapter endorsed it. Our Vermont Psychiatric Association endorsed it.”
Part 2 of the interview here
Tags: Amy Goodman, Deb Richter, Democracy Now, single payer, Vermont
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