Members of the House Health Care Committee listen to testimony at the Statehouse in Montpelier on Feb. 3. From the left are committee chair Rep. Alyssa Black, D-Essex Town; Rep. Daisy Berbeco, D-Winooski; and Rep. Brian Cina, P/D-Burlington. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
How much sway does the voice of the people really have in the People’s House?
On Town Meeting Day, eight Vermont towns resoundingly called on the Legislature to take up a bill that would launch a multiphase universal health care program, called Green Mountain Care.
That bill, H.433, did not make it past crossover deadlines and has no real chance of becoming a law this year. But House Health Care Committee members still took it off the wall Wednesday and had legislative counsel Jennifer Carbee walk them through the bill’s language — “for educational purposes,” at least, said Rep. Alyssa Black, D-Essex Town, the committee chair.
Still, the activists behind the Town Meeting Day resolution found legislators’ approach to the faltering bill promising.
“I was buoyed,” Dr. Jack Mayer, a primary care physician who testified before the committee Wednesday, told VTDigger. He was one of the driving forces behind putting the resolution to town meeting voters.
“In the end, the intention of the resolution was, let’s just get this onto the floor. Let’s debate this. Let’s consider it. Let’s have the conversation,” he said.
Lawmakers on the House panel asked technical questions about what kind of preventative services Green Mountain Care might include and how the state might fund such a program. They entertained these concerns not only for the fun of it, but also to inform their work on the year’s big primary care bill, S.197, that just crossed into their committee from the Senate.
That bill, which would devise a payment system for patients to access primary care without needing to pay for each service, may very well be the vehicle for the spirit of universal care — or at least universal primary care — to live on.
“I think the landscape is starting to change,” Mayer said. “I think there’s a dawning awareness on the part of the Legislature that what we’re doing is unsustainable, and — for a host of reasons — it makes sense to start entertaining the notion of a publicly funded primary care.”
In particular, Mayer will be looking for the legislation to include a study that can explore the financial realities of implementing a universal primary care system. To him, it would be the first indication of serious change.
The committee largely shared his enthusiasm and desire to explore universal care further — and they weren’t just humoring him this April Fool’s Day.
“We have an ongoing joke in this committee, that if you don’t believe in universal health care when you start in this committee, you will by the time you finish,” said Black, the chair.
— Olivia Gieger
In the know
The Vermont Labor Relations Board has ordered that Gov. Phil Scott’s administration “rescind” a controversial requirement that state employees return to their physical offices three days per week.
The board, a non-judicial body that makes decisions on the labor grievances of state employees, said in its decision Wednesday that the state has “refused to bargain in good faith and interfered with employees’ exercise of rights” in requiring in-person work.
Scott called the decision “disappointing, but not surprising” in his weekly press conference Wednesday, and said the board’s membership is “weighted towards labor.”
While Scott appointed the board’s members himself, he told reporters that “parameters” governing the body’s makeup had limited his choices, appearing to refer to the panel’s statutory guidelines.
Earlier in the day, his office put out a statement lambasting the state labor relations board and its decision, calling the body “broken.”
The state has already filed a notice of appeal with the Vermont Supreme Court, officials said.
The Vermont State Employees’ Association, for its part, called the decision a “stunning victory” in a Wednesday email to members. The order, union leadership said in that email, protects “the rights of our members to have a say in their conditions of employment.”
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— Theo Wells-Spackman
Rep. Brian Cina, P/D-Burlington, pulled a pair of Airpods from his jacket pocket: “Someday soon — very soon — you’re going to be able to take these, put it in your ear,” he said, doing so, “and it’s going to link with your brain. We’re very close to that.”
He demonstrated this before the Senate Health and Welfare Committee on Wednesday as he reported his neural privacy bill, H.814, which aims to establish standards and rights to protect people’s privacy and humanity from the ever-encroaching reach of artificial intelligence.
The bill would establish an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council to provide recommendations for how the state uses the technology in health care, education, state and local budgets, and more.
“As scary as it may sound, it’s here. We cannot really stop it at this point,” Cina said of AI technology interfacing with all facets of life.
Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, said it’s likely her committee will take up the bill. Its core message that AI should improve the human condition, not undermine it, is an important one, she said.
— Olivia Gieger
On the move
On Wednesday, senators passed S.193, which would create a facility for people who are charged with violent crimes but are temporarily found incompetent to stand trial or found by a court to be not guilty by reason of insanity.
Twenty-nine senators voted in favor of the bill. Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, was the lone legislator opposed.
Vyhovsky earlier voted against the bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying in meetings that she didn’t want the facility to be run by the Vermont Department of Corrections.
Under the bill, people would be referred into the facility only if they don’t fit the clinical threshold to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital but could still be considered a danger to others.
Gov. Phil Scott and his cabinet have pushed legislators to advance the bill. For years, bills with similar measures have not come to fruition.
“We need a secure setting where violent offenders with mental illness, developmental disabilities or substance use disorders can receive appropriate care and have their competency restored, if possible, so they can stand trial,” said Jaye Johnson, Scott’s legal counsel, at the governor’s press conference last month.
— Charlotte Oliver