As he pushes forward with health-care reform, Gov. Peter Shumlin wants to divorce the issue of funding from the process of developing a single-payer design.
The strategy, he has admitted, is at least a little bit political. He said he doesn’t want the reform debate weighed down by the controversy that would accompany talk of a payroll tax – as Harvard economist William Hsiao has proposed – or some other public-financing method.
But Anya Rader Wallack, point-woman for Shumlin’s reform initiative, says the administration isn’t holding anything back. In truth, she says, they haven’t figured out how to finance the new system.
“I honestly don’t know,” Rader Wallack said today.
She says the administration’s health-care bill, expected to arrive on legislators’ desks early next week, won’t offer any clues.
“In drafting the bill, we put very general language in there,” she says.
Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding, she says, will be spend the coming months vetting the range of funding options.
Rader Wallack says there are a number of options beyond the payroll tax – “you can go with premiums, payroll tax, income tax, you name it,” she says. “Hsiao had his reasons for choosing a payroll tax and obviously we will look at those.”
Rader Wallack says choosing a specific funding mechanism isn’t as important as designing a system that actually contains costs.
“In large part it doesn’t matter how you pay for it,” Rader Wallack says. “How you pay for it is how you come up with the money. But system redesign is about how you make sure it costs less over time, and how you keep the rate of growth in costs reasonable over time.”
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