By: Jim Hoover

Another very important bit of news the mainstream corporate media won’t feature: Vermont has voted for the first single-payer health care system, in other words, a system without private health care middlemen who, leech-like, suck record profits out of the misery of patients[i].

Now, who doesn’t want to spread this news? Obviously the health care industry would lose their stranglehold on a monopolistic market that pays them record profits. Their pharmaceutical allies would be subject to government bargaining for reasonable drug prices.

Republicans as shills of big business do not want single-payer systems because they are attached at the hip to lobbyists who support the health care industry, including bloated drug companies and private insurance companies which pay their executives obscene pay packages drawn from the blood of patients.

Vermont is a land of proud firsts. It was the first to join the 13 Colonies. Its constitution was the first to ban slavery. It was the first to establish the right to free education for all. It was the first to legalize same-sex civil unions. Now it is the first to offer single-payer health care.

Harvard economist William Hsiao, hired by Vermont, calculated that Vermont’s single-payer system will produce savings of 24.3% for total health care expenditures between 2015 and 2024. Considering that current American health care administrative costs are 15% more than that of Canada and 20% more than Medicare costs, that seems reasonable, especially considering the current lack of bargaining for lower drug costs by Medicare.

According to Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, premiums go up 10, 15, 20 percent a year. The cost is killing small business, and it’s killing middle class Americans — both kicked in the teeth over the last several years. The plan will take the insurance company profits, the pharmaceutical company profits, and the other folks that are mining the system to make a lot of money on the backs of our illnesses, and apply it to healthier Vermonters.

The Vermont plan allows both private and public health care providers to operate, but instead of the patient or the patient’s private health insurance company paying the bill, the state does.

Vermont is proving that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

The pressures of lobbyists at the top have proven, most recently with the health care reform plan, that this kind of change cannot happen from the top down.