This commentary is by Don Tinney of South Hero. He is a high-school English teacher who is the elected president of Vermont-NEA, the union of 13,000 educators who shape the state’s future every day in our local public schools.
Since the beginning of the year, Vermont Healthcare 911 — a broad coalition of unions (including Vermont-NEA), business leaders, reform advocates and medical caregivers — has been sounding the alarm about Vermont’s dubious distinction of having the highest commercial insurance premiums in the country and why key sectors of the health care system — hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers, primary care practices and mental health services — are on the edge of financial collapse or can no longer meet patient needs.
Even the state’s largest insurance carrier, Blue Cross of Vermont, is facing an unprecedented depletion of reserves and mounting costs that threaten its fiscal solvency.
The specter of the affordability crisis in health care looms large. We all live in its shadow. Ever-rising commercial premiums and out-of-pocket costs, driven largely by hospital prices and budgets, are an existential threat to the well-being and stability of businesses, public schools, municipal and state institutions, health care workers, patients and families.
Since 2018 alone, the cost of a family insurance plan on Vermont Health Connect rose by a staggering 92%, making Vermont’s family premiums the most expensive in the country.
Between 2020 and 2025, premium contributions by school districts and school employees combined grew by more than 60%.
The major drivers are hospital and prescription costs.
Every dollar spent on overpriced medical services and products and bloated hospital administration is a dollar robbed from children’s education. When premium rates rise dramatically, year after year, so do property taxes. Gov. Phil Scott and lawmakers should begin to connect these dots first when they talk about affordability and public education.
Reading the data reports of VHC 911 and talking with fellow members of its leadership council has led me to hope that legislators, regulators and the governor can be compelled, finally, to act in concert in the public’s interest. In fact, I am happy to report that two measures recently passed by lawmakers would begin to curb the unsustainable growth in hospital and drug costs.
Recall that the Act 167 report, issued last September, laid out an ambitious but achievable roadmap to ensure the financial stability of our hospitals, to revitalize community care, and to bring down costs for the commercially insured. When introducing its findings, Dr. Bruce Hamory could not have been clearer on the scope of the problems we face and the necessity for corrective action: “The platform for health care in Vermont has burned and requires rebuilding in a modern form with more sustainable governance and funding methods.”
Let’s start rebuilding — and this means regulating and lowering hospital prices. Vermont-NEA is fed up with price gouging, cost-shifting and blaming patients and working families for high prices. Recently, Don George, Blue Cross’s CEO, acknowledged that the beleaguered carrier has called on the Green Mountain Care Board “to implement hospital/payer-specific revenue caps — an important step toward affordability.”
Additionally, the persistent and widespread financial harm endured by community-care providers — the bedrock of primary care, wellness and prevention, and mental health — is unconscionable. Our union, therefore, will continue to strongly oppose cuts to essential services and frontline medical personnel by hospital executives.
If certain hospital leaders refuse to work collaboratively with legislators and GMCB to bring down prices and spending, and to manage their facilities more transparently and cost-effectively, they should step aside in favor of those who will.
VHC 911’s detailed revelations on unethical profiteering by UVMMC at the expense of the commercial insurance market and its exorbitant spending on administrative and management personnel who do not deliver patient care show us that we can lower hospital costs without compromising access to care or hurting the medical professionals who provide it.
Health care reform is within our reach if we muster political resolve, strengthen the Green Mountain Care Board and craft rate-setting policies, regulations and population health priorities informed by the Act 167 Report and VHC 911’s research.
Our collective efforts will not be confined to hospitals, but that is where they must begin.
