World News Korner

While the Republicans do everything they can to sabotage the rollout of Obamacare, Vermont is quietly constructing the nation's first government funded universal health care system.

Courtesy of the Providence Journal:

As states open insurance marketplaces amid uncertainty about whether they are a solution for health care, Vermont is eyeing a bigger goal, one that more fully embraces a government-funded model.

The state has a planned 2017 launch of the nation’s first universal health care system, a sort of modified Medicare-for-all that has long been a dream for many liberals.

The plan is especially ambitious in the current atmosphere surrounding health care in the United States. Republicans in Congress balk at the federal health overhaul years after it was signed into law. States are still negotiating their terms for implementing it. And some major employers have begun to drastically limit their offerings of employee health insurance, raising questions about the future of the industry altogether.

In such a setting, Vermont’s plan looks more and more like an anomaly. It combines universal coverage with new cost controls in an effort to move away from a system in which the more procedures doctors and hospitals perform, the more they get paid, to one in which providers have a set budget to care for a set number of patients.

The result will be health care that’s “a right and not a privilege,” Gov. Peter Shumlin said.

I truly think that this is the future of health care in this country, and once Vermont demonstrates how workable and superior the model is there will be vast pressure placed on other states, and the federal government, to follow suit.

Man this is definitely going to make some Right Wing heads explode!

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