By Michael Bielawski
The healthcare industry says that demand for products and services is increasing and to meet those new costs visits and insurance premiums will likewise increase.
In July, the Green Mountain Care Board started issuing public warnings that they were experiencing and receiving feedback that the healthcare industry in Vermont was facing dire economic circumstances.
GMCB hired Oliver Wyman LLC and Dr. Bruce Hamory to study cost issues for the state’s hospital network as mandated by Act 167 passed in 2022. The now-infamous “Oliver Wyman” report includes recommendations for hospital closures. The report has since been taken off the state’s website.
Premiums on the rise
VDC reported in July, the GMCB responded to the report noting, “Opening comments noted that Vermont has the ‘worst health care costs in the country.’ The average lowest-cost Silver-level premium health insurance plan in Vermont is over twice as much as the national average.”
Back in August, the final Green Mountain Care Board-approved premium rate increase for Blue Cross/Blue Shield was 19.8% and for MVP Healthcare it was 14.2%.
Also in August, VDC reported, “Vermont’s benchmark health insurance premiums are the highest rate in the nation. They’ve more than doubled since 2018. Yet the state’s hospitals are on a trajectory to ‘negative operating margins.’”
It continued, “Hamory’s team projected that based on 3.5% hospital revenue growth and 5% cost growth, in five years, nearly all Vermont hospitals will have negative operating margins. The benchmark Silver Plan Blue Cross-Blue Shield premium in Vermont has risen 108% since 2018 and is the highest in the nation.”
Hospital closures?
In November tensions rose as the report suggested that some hospitals close or dramatically restructure.
Such prompted the Mayor of Newport Linda Sullivan to write in her weekly report in September, “I can’t think of anything that would more discourage the investors and development we are trying to attract to the region than to have the State communicate that we so little value the communities in this remote and isolated part of the State that we are as a State going to just gut our health care infrastructure here.”
The story then prompted a response from GMCB Chair Owen Foster, who said, “The Oliver Wyman report does not mandate any changes at any Vermont hospital. Rather, it provides a projection of Vermont’s financial headwinds and provides options for local communities and hospital leaders to consider.”
Foster acknowledges that the financial shortfalls highlighted in the report will need to be addressed. He wrote that the report identifies “gaps in care to essential services, including long-term care and home health and hospice, mental health care, and primary care, that the Oliver Wyman report identifies and provides options.”
Americans getting sicker?
A study published by the JAMA Network looked at the nation’s overall health trends and indicated that Americans spend a higher percentage of their lives being sick than most other developed nations.
“The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—found the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest gap of any of the 183 countries included in the study,” ARS Technica reported.
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle