BRATTLEBORO — The Green Mountain Care Board has recently granted double-digit rate increases to Vermont's largest insurance companies.
The board was created to oversee the transition to universal health care. It is now chaired by a Koch brothers operative, appointed by a governor who is a Koch brothers beneficiary.
The board's functional mission now is to enrich insurance companies, reward hospitals for profiting from the sick, and oversee the handing over of Vermont's health-care system to a corporation, One Care, that is led by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital and the University of Vermont Medical Center. They make their most consequential decisions, such as these egregious yearly rate hikes, when the legislature is out of session, preventing even a vocal check on their insidious work.
Universal health care is still the law in Vermont (Act 48), and until our legislators drop their cowardice and campaign profiteering to get serious about implementing it, this board should not exist.
Neither Brattleboro nor Windham County has such a legislator, and it is up to voting citizens to oust them as immediately as possible and replace them with actual champions of the people, rather than the co-conspirators for corporate profiteering and health-care privatization that are currently in office.