Vermont’s Shumlin Uses Obama Health Law to Build Bridge to State-Run Care

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/vermont-s-shumlin-uses-obama-health-law-to-build-bridge-to-state-run-care.html

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin kicks off a drive today to create a publicly financed health-care system for all residents in the second-smallest U.S. state by population, building off of the 2010 national health overhaul.

By signing a bill that lays a framework for building a single-payer insurance system for Vermont’s 625,700 residents by 2017, Shumlin will begin creating the first state-financed universal health plan in the U.S. The measure initially creates an insurance exchange authorized by the federal law.

The health-care overhaul led by President Barack Obama provided the basis for the bill sought by Shumlin, a first-term Democrat who beat his Republican foe by fewer than 5,000 votes last year. Vermont may produce a national health-care model, in contrast with 25 states that have joined Florida’s challenge to the U.S. law as an unconstitutional overreach of federal power.

“We are the first state that is affirming that we are going to implement a single-payer health-care system,” Shumlin, 55, said in a telephone interview this week. The measure asserts that “health care is a basic human right for all,” he said. “This is a really significant step.”

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1. I love having a gov who believes that health care is a human right

and that's not the only good thing about him by a long shot. In the VT Senate he was the driving force behind shuttering Vermont Yankee. He's strongly pro-Union and a real environmentalist. No, he's not perfect but after years of a republican gov, he's great.