Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute writes in the Washington Examiner:

Upon examination, Vermont’s new law is not actually the start of single-payer health care, but rather the continuation of failed state government attempts to socialize the state’s health care system. …

Its big accomplishment is the Vermont Health Benefit Exchange, essentially a website already required by Obamacare to sell government-approved private insurance by 2014, and the Green Mountain Care Board, a sort of executive committee that will introduce price controls on health care in Vermont and design the details of the future single-payer plan.

Backers are aiming for a single-payer plan by 2014, but this requires permission from multiple federal agencies, some of which aren’t in operation until 2017. Most important, state legislators punted on financing the undertaking. …

Vermont’s new bill will move the state to a government-run health care system, but it’s not the utopian one advertised by today’s politicians. It’s called Medicaid, a near-perfect embodiment of government in action.

It’s a federal-state program that overpromises and underdelivers, a program in which everything is free at the point of consumption but nothing much of value is available — at least not without a long, hard wait.

Read the whole article: It’s déja vu all over again in Vermont | The Examiner.

(via FIRM)