Lessons from Vermont

What does Vermont’s failed single-payer plan tell us about future reform efforts?

by A.W. Gaffney

Has the tide of health care justice turned — in the wrong direction? Last month, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin announced that he could no longer “responsibly support” a funding plan for his long-awaited “single-payer” plan for the state. It wasn’t long before some on the Right claimed a historic victory.

“As crises of faith go,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board gloated, “this is Mikhail Gorbachev circa 1991 territory.” After all, single-payer health care, according to the Journal, is not merely “the polite term for socialized medicine,” but nothing less than “the ultimate goal of the political left.”