Living

I make no claim of being a therapist or an expert on human behavior. But when you have been around for nearly eight decades you do come to understand a few things. I have learned that people who are unhappy about the course of their lives, people, who feel they are trapped in their lives with no way out and people who feel that the world around them will not allow them to succeed, often turn to drugs and/or addictive behaviors to ease their pain.

This is not a judgment call but simply an observation. I suspect that if you were to do a survey among people who have turned to drugs or alcohol or who have any kind of addiction at the center of their life, you would find most of those people to be among the unhappy.

The alarm is being sounded. Vermont’s health care system is in crisis and if we don’t take serious measures to change things the non-system we have will become financially unsustainable by 2030. According to a recent article in The Commons, “Dr. Bruce Hamory and his team were hired by the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB) in response to the Vermont Legislature passing Act 167 for health care reform. The legislation is intended to create a sustainable, affordable, and equitable future for Vermont’s 14 hospitals and health care providers in general.”

Act 167 has a few good elements and I am sure that Hamory and his team have come up with a some good ideas to make the delivery and accessibility of health care in Vermont better. At one of a number of state-wide meetings held in Brattleboro on July 17 Hamory said that we have to stop tinkering around the edges and make changes to help health care in Vermont financially viable.

But everything I heard makes me believe that all of the ideas that have been presented recently continue to tinker around the edges, as have all of the efforts of health care reform since the failure to enact a single payer system in Vermont played out during the Shumlin administration.

When I first heard about a Vermont bill that became law on July 1, 2024 I thought the state had entered into a new era of health care affordability. The news report outlined some of the circumstances under which people could receive free hospital care. When I read the bill it turned out there is mostly nothing new, but it’s worth talking about it because some people need to know about hospital policies regarding free care.

Because all of Vermont’s hospitals are non-profit they have some degree of requirement to provide free care to needy individuals. That used to apply to hospitals that took money under the Hill-Burton Act but I think those days have passed and free care is still part of a hospital’s budget.