Peter Shumlin told a group of Harvard University scholars Tuesday that he didn’t have the political capital to pass single-payer health care in Vermont.
The three-term Democratic former Vermont governor revisited his signature political failure during a live-streamed interview with Harvard public health professor John McDonough.
“Was that a policy decision or was that a political decision, do you think?” asked McDonough, referring to Shumlin’s decision to pull the plug on single-payer.
“They’re always both,” Shumlin responded. “There was no way I was gonna get the votes in either the House or the Senate to pass the single-payer plan that I wanted to pass … I had Progressive senators coming to me saying, ‘What if we just slowed down?’”
In December 2014, Shumlin announced that he was abandoning his effort to create a single-payer health care system. Among the concerns, Shumlin said Tuesday, were the huge tax increase the new system would have required without the guarantee of an immediate reduction in health care costs, unpredictability in the federal government, and reticent state lawmakers.
Shumlin said his failed attempt to build Vermont Health Connect, the online health insurance marketplace, “turned out to be my biggest downfall.” The deeply dysfunctional platform, Shumlin told the audience, meant he “lost tremendous credibility as a leader on health care.”
He also argued that his staff was preoccupied with trying to fix the exchange, to the detriment of actually developing single-payer.
“We just constantly … were getting distracted from this huge mission of moving to a single-payer system,” Shumlin said. “I had to take my best single-payer people that were hired and put them on [2011’s Tropical Storm] Irene, put them on getting the damn exchange to work — you know, all these things.”
The ex-gov, who spent the spring as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, suggested that he took the fall for the failure, sparing lawmakers when other politicians might have thrown them under the bus.
“Most politicians would have said … those legislators are so incompetent, they’ve got no guts, why can’t they pass single-player, it’s the right thing to do,” Shumlin said during Tuesday’s event. “I chose not to do that. I just felt that really this was my idea, I owned it and I needed to own its failure.”
When McDonough asked what lesson could be gleaned from Vermont’s experience, Shumlin responded, “The lesson is, I was wrong. I don’t think small states can go it alone … with an unstable federal partnership.”
He instead endorsed the Medicare for All plan that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced last week, calling it the “smartest way to go.”
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If Shumlin had listened to some of his primary rivals in 2010, he would have known his single-payer idea was doomed before it started, as many of us understood.
If voters hadn’t been fooled by his false and empty promises of a single-payer system, we would have elected a democratic governor who would have made a positive impact on the lives of many struggling Vermonters and not just lined the pockets of his developer and utility friends.
Shumlin says he chose not to blame the Legislature for the failure of his single payer idea! How magnanimous of him! This just shows that he’s still a delusional narcissist. In fact, he would have no basis for “blaming” them for the failure of an idea that was his, not theirs. He never even sent them a bill to consider. What a supernice guy he is for “choosing” not to blame others for his failures!
We are still gagging on and unable to digest Skunkman’s big ‘Nothingburger’ that he told us the problems with his failed Exchange were. One of the biggest colossal wastes of taxpayer dollars ever thrown down a rat hole in Vermont State history.
His nose really grew after telling that one.
PS. He had no gravitas or credibility left to lose anyway contrary to what he told the Harvard ‘scholars’…
The whole failed Vermont Health Exchange experiment and waste of dollars that went into it was still worth seeing Shumlin and his pals in Montpelier get Grubered by Jonathon Gruber himself. Gruber may not have been able to personally fleece them monetarily with his invoicing once Shummy realized he was played just like he played his slow neighbor on that land deal, but, it put the cherry on top of the whole fiasco for history and posterity’s sake.
Will there be any follow-up events to “explain” his other failures? How about EB5, that should be good for a full week.
He certainly did not have the political capital nor did he have the support of his constituency.
He was never a stickler for the truth and people lost faith in him and his abilities or they saw his inabilities clearly.
Funny I don’t recall seeing Robin Lunge and Lawrence Miller out there fighting Irene….did I miss something?