At a candidates' forum this week, the four candidates for state representative expressed strong opinions about Vermont's failed education funding formula, our current and prospective future health care costs and property tax increases.
This comes at a time when the 100,000 or so Vermonters who are in the state's health care exchange are being asked to re-up for another year and are finding that, guess what? Rates are up.
Now into this morass of bad choices comes a report from the Vermont School Board's Association suggesting that if all teachers in the state were to have their health care plans reduced from their current levels, which are the equivalent of a platinum plan on Vermont Health Connect, to the equivalent of the health exchange's gold plan, there would be a $39 million reduction in education costs (and hence property taxes).
The logic in reducing teachers and all school district employees from platinum to gold is that 86 percent of health exchange enrollees are enrolled in the gold plan.
And that may be true, strictly in terms of math. But it seems like a bait and switch for all of us. So education funding is a broken formula as is the health care exchange. Is the solution to take a negotiated benefit away from teachers?
Wouldn't a better solution be to require all Vermont state employees and all educators into the health care exchange?
The same report goes on to conclude that if Vermont's single-payer plan, Green Mountain Care, were to go into effect with a 9 percent employer payroll tax, there would be a 12 percent reduction in property tax rates in the state because property taxes would presumably not be paying for teachers' health care.
Wouldn't property taxes still have to be used to pay for the teachers' employers' 9 percent contribution? Don't we employ the teachers?
We have two failed systems on our hands and this report – while mathematically correct – does not do anything to address the root causes of the failed systems. It just muddies the waters by trying to link single-payer health care to property tax relief.
{loadnavigation}
