There’s the old saying about law-making and sausage-making and, there was a little of that going on in the House Health Care Committee (HHCC) as we passed H.481. I raise that old saying acknowledging two of my great dietary weaknesses: I love sausage (hot Italian, kielbasa, chorizo, bacon hot dogs, andouille)...and I have a massive sweet tooth. H.481 is the HHCC’s major effort on health care reform this year. The headline overview of the bill: it addresses the Medicaid cost shift, provides additional assistance to under-insured Vermonters, allocates additional resources to support primary care providers and the Blueprint for Health, and increases the funding for and responsibilities of the
At this point in the session, each committee is hard at work trying to finalize bills before Crossover – a line in the sand whereby bills that we expect the Senate to take up before adjournment must have been voted out of committee and on to the full House. Here is a truncated description of some of the money bills that are on the move. The Appropriations Committee is struggling mightily to balance the FY'16 state budget. The total combined budget of both state and federal monies will be about $6.4 billion and will represent about a 3.5% increase over last year. However, when we convened in January, total expenditures were projected to rise at more than 6%, that is nearly twice the growth of
With the Red Sox back in the sports pages, I'll use a baseball analogy regarding the education bill, H.361, that was just voted out of the House Education Committee. While there was a tremendous amount of effort to craft this legislation, we are really only in the third inning of a long contest that will be played out into May. Functionally, this education legislation is intended to address two major issues. The first is the inflation in education costs relative to the decline in the number of K-12 students. Vermont’s K-12 student population declined from approximately 97,000 in 2004 to 82,000 in 2014. In spite of this 15% decline, we have retained the same number of educators in our sch
