Lamoille County Mental Health Services in Morristown. Photo via Facebook
This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Oct. 9, 2025.
Area health care providers specializing in treatment for mental health-related issues and substance-use disorders are collaborating to better serve their shared patients, even as looming cuts to public insurance threaten to make treatment more challenging.
Lamoille County Mental Health Services CEO Jennifer Stratton, who has been on the job for about 18 months, said working with other health care providers like Lamoille Health Partners and Copley Hospital — as well as area law enforcement agencies — has been a main priority.
Both Lamoille Health Partners and Lamoille County Mental Health Services serve patients with overlapping health issues. Stratton said she often meets with health partners CEO Susan Bartlett, as many patients have what she calls co-occurring needs, which refers to their intersecting medical problems like substance-use disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Lamoille County doesn’t have the “situation table” setups being explored in other Vermont towns — formal protocols for involving various health care, social support and police organizations when dealing with cases where various issues intersect. Instead, the Lamoille Health Collaborative, founded by Lamoille Health Partners to address the increasingly overlapping health issues faced in the early pandemic period, allows organizations to coordinate.
Lamoille County Mental Health Services fields an around-the-clock crisis response team that responds, alongside police, to mental health emergencies. Many of them occur at Copley Hospital, leading Stratton to work closely with CEO Joe Woodin to coordinate resources.
Between the local Lamoille Health Collaborative, and the Woodin-led New England Health Collaborative — which includes other Vermont hospitals, the Lamoille Health Partners and other organizations — health care providers in Lamoille County have never been so strategically aligned, their executives say.
In one small example of how the health collaborative members look out for one another, the Lamoille Health Partners sold Lamoille County Mental Health Services some equipment for new sensory room equipment.
It may soon be more necessary than ever.
Last year, Lamoille Health Partners laid off its former director and sold off its two Washington Highway offices to Copley Hospital to stem a financial crisis.
And looming cuts to Medicaid, passed in the so-called “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” in July by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump, would eliminate about $1 trillion in funding over 10 years for the federal program that provides insurance to low-income and disabled people, and children. Those cuts would particularly threaten funding for rural health care providers.
“At Lamoille County Mental Health Services — and I’m sure I’m speaking collectively for all of the individuals who are part of the Lamoille Health Collaborative, because we all work really well together — we want to meet the needs of our community and the individuals,” Stratton said. “If we’re not receiving the funding to do so, we can’t. Most of us are so dependent on Medicaid that it makes it difficult, financially, to be able to continue to provide those services without individuals receiving that funding.”
Bracing for impact
Stratton worries not just about a larger number of uninsured patients but also about the new work requirement provisions included in the bill that demand Medicaid recipients report their work status at least twice a year. A health policy research report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a similar program implemented in Arkansas led to 18,000 people becoming uninsured.
“Individuals are going to have to be reapplying for their Medicaid twice a year, and I am concerned that there’s going to be a lot of individuals that are going to be kicked off, at least temporarily, for their Medicaid,” Stratton said.
This potential change could mean even those who do continue to qualify for public insurance will face increased bureaucratic barriers and a higher likelihood of insurance interruptions. For patients juggling an interconnected suite of ailments across multiple doctors and specialists, even a brief interruption in insurance can delay necessary and potentially life-saving treatment.
Stratton has started an effort to get Lamoille County Mental Health Services staff trained as Medicaid assessors, which will allow them to have better access to patient’s insurance applications, and has urged her fellow health collaborative members to train their staff members as well.
Copley CEO Woodin echoed that sentiment.
“I think we’re always relearning that we need each other,” Woodin said. “Hospitals, primary care, specialists, home health agency, nursing home. We’re all sort of a team taking care of the same folks, so it’s important that we get along and support each other.”
On the front lines
The ongoing shutdown of the federal government stems from an effort by Democratic lawmakers, including Vermont’s federal delegation, to force Republicans to reverse planned cuts to Medicaid and public option insurance subsidies passed in their bill over the summer. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders told CNN on Tuesday he was concerned the proposed cuts could “literally collapse the entire (health care) system.”
At the Johnson Health Center, directors Geoff and Caroline Butler are on the frontline of a system that is already badly frayed, providing primary care with a substance-use disorder focus in both Johnson and Burlington.
“The looming cuts are something that we think about every day over at the health center,” Geoff Butler said. “With the potential of thousands of Vermont owners losing their coverage, it’s a devastating thought.”
At the health center, patients are already being treated for their intersecting medical, mental health and addiction issues, and staff are already trained to assist patients with insurance paperwork, and they have an on-staff social worker. Butler said it’s the material issues — like access to housing, something that no doctor can address — that are the biggest barriers to care.
“I think one of the biggest things though we are seeing lately with mental health and substance-use issues is housing,” Butler said. “We work with the majority of the unhoused population in Burlington, and that housing piece, making sure people are housed through the winter, at least have a warm place to go for the night.”
In a recent policy report from the Vermont Department of Health laying out initiatives for the next five years, the first goal proposed is to “improve the availability of affordable, accessible, and safe housing.” The fourth goal proposed is to “strengthen the capacity of the mental health and substance use services system to support individuals and communities.”
There are already “no great options for inpatient mental health care in Vermont,” Butler said, and long waiting lists for those that are there. Lamoille County Mental Health Services has a handful of beds in Morrisville and Johnson, and a couple of beds dedicated to the needs of patients in crisis.
“The organizations doing that work are doing great work. It’s just so limited,” Butler said.