Rutland — I am the Rutland city treasurer and, since February of this year, I have used the financial skills I developed over a professional lifetime to evaluate the financial impact of Vermont’s planned transition to Green Mountain Care through the health care exchange beginning in 2014.
I wish my careful, professional analysis was wrong, but it reveals clearly that creating a state public health care plan will result in a $300-plus million annual shortfall in the fund, culminating in a $2 billion cumulative deficit in five years.
That projected deficit is pretty shocking, but there is sufficient information available in state reports, administration memos, and other public sources for any financially adept person to develop a similarly complete projection model and maybe they can come up with a different conclusion...
I urge state legislators to request, from the administration, a complete financial projection to be developed almost immediately, including revenues and expenses, actuarial analysis and serious independent economic studies to support the assumptions of the projections in order to ensure due diligence is done.
Revenue projections are particularly important because the new state health care fund, with over $3 billion in annual expenses, will be larger than the Education Fund, General Fund and the Transportation fund combined. No other piece of legislation that has come out of Montpelier—not even Act 60—will have the far reaching impacts of Act 48 on our economy, our state treasury, our well-being and quality of life, and the future of Vermont. Before we go any further with the Governor’s health care plan, the administration simply must demonstrate that revenues will be sufficient to prevent anything like the $2 billion cumulative deficit the enclosed projections show occurring in five years.
The governor may not agree that these projections are correct but they present a challenge to the administration (and to you!) to explore the financial issues more completely than has been done so far.
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