BURLINGTON, Vt., April 24 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the senior Obama administration official responsible for improving access to health care met here today with representatives from 11 community health centers throughout Vermont.
Mary Wakefield, who heads the Health Resources and Services Administration at the Department of Health and Human Services, joined Sanders at a news conference to discuss what the senator has called a crisis in primary care in the United States.
“We have made some good progress in Vermont and across the nation in the last few years but clearly we still have a long way to go,” Sanders said.
A Sanders provision in the Affordable Care Act authorized $11 billion to build, expand and operate Federally Qualified Health Centers. The locally-run centers offer affordable primary, dental and mental health care and low-cost prescription drugs. In Vermont, there were only two community health centers a decade ago. This year, 11 centers across the state will serve about 163,000 patients. That’s more than one in four people in the state and one of the highest participation rates in the country.
Three new centers opening this year in Vermont are the Battenkill Valley Health Center in Arlington, the Five Town Health Alliance in Bristol and the Gifford Health Care in Randolph.
Sanders, who chairs a Senate panel on health care, has introduced legislation to attract more doctors and other health care providers to primary care. His bill would boost funding for community health centers; dramatically increase opportunities for medical school graduates to go into family medicine; raise Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates for primary care providers; and expand National Health Service Corps loan and scholarship programs for primary care providers.
After the news conference, Sanders and Wakefield traveled to Richford to tour the Northern Tier Center for Health.
To see a map of areas of Vermont served by health centers, click here. Contact: Michael Briggs (202) 224-5141
As Vermont Goes, So Goes the Nation?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/as-vermont-goes-so-goes-the-nation.html?ref=vermont&_r=0
Three years ago, Peter Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, signed a bill creating Green Mountain Care: a single-payer system in which, if all goes according to plan, the state will regulate doctors’ fees and cover Vermonters’ medical bills. Mr. Shumlin is a Democrat, and the bill’s passage is a credit to his party. Yet a small upstart spent years building support for reform and nudging the Democrats left: the Vermont Progressive Party. The Progressives owe much of their success to the oddities of Vermont politics. But their example offers hope that the most frustrating dimensions of our political culture can change, despite obstacles with deep roots in American history.
Green Mountain Care won’t begin until at least 2017, but Vermont liberals are optimistic. “Americans want to see a model that works,” Senator Bernie Sanders told The Atlantic in December. (Mr. Sanders is an independent, but a longtime ally of the Progressives.) “If Vermont can be that model it will have a profound impact on discourse in this country.”
Before you dismiss that prospect as wishful thinking, consider: That’s how national health care happened in Canada. A third party’s provincial experiment paved the way for national reform. In 1946, the social-democratic government of Saskatchewan passed a law providing free hospital care to most residents. The model spread to other provinces, and in 1957 the federal government adopted a cost-sharing measure that evolved into today’s universal single-payer system.