Megan McArdle examines in a Bloomberg View column Vermont’s ambitious response to the federal Affordable Care Act.
Of the plans that states have hatched for the Affordable Care Act, none has been bolder than that of Vermont, which wants to implement a single-payer health-care system, along the lines of what you might find in Britain or Canada. One government-operated system will cover all 620,000 of Vermont’s citizens. The hope is that such a system will allow Vermont to get costs down closer to Canada’s, as well as improve health by coordinating care and ensuring universal coverage.
Just two small issues need to be resolved before the state gets to all systems go: First, it needs the federal government to grant waivers allowing Vermont to divert Medicaid and other health-care funding into the single-payer system. And second, Vermont needs to find some way to pay for it. …
… Vermont is a middling-tax state, as states go. And that’s not an accident; its population consists of longtime Vermonters, some of whom vote Republican (at least for governor) and are not super-tax-friendly, and transplants from Massachusetts and New York state, who, last time I looked, had moved to Vermont partly because the taxes were lower. Paying for this program would likely make Vermont the highest-taxed state in the nation, by quite a lot.
Now, you can argue that people should be glad to make this trade-off, not just for peace of mind, but because they will trade higher taxes for lower (no) insurance premiums. You can also argue that poor people in America should be laughing and dancing and singing all day because every one of them is economically better off than starving farmers in drought-ridden regions of Africa. Neither argument will do you much good, however, because that’s not how people think.
