Vermont regulators, hospitals interested in seeing work from new VT Healthcare 911 coalition partly led by former Gov. Jim Douglas

A coalition featuring a former governor, doctors, and business and labor leaders says the cost of health care in Vermont is too high and plans to make lowering a priority.

The coalition, VT Healthcare 911, held a press conference Wednesday to announce its intentions

"Vermont's premiums are double the national average," stated former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, in a release. "We know this is hurting job growth and slowing our economy."

According to the release, Douglas is co-chair of the group's leadership council along with Lisa Ventriss, former leader of Vermont Business Roundtable.

Former state senator Chris Pearson is chair of the coalition's board of directors.

"It is an unusual coalition. I mean, it's hard to remember a time when CEOs, labor, and consumer groups were all united like that," he said Thursday.

The group began to form last year around data showing Vermont pays much more through hospital costs than its neighboring states, said Pearson.

"And as we sat together and stewed on it, we started talking about the strategy of a broad and unusual coalition to help this case get taken seriously," he said. "To me, it is a very serious crisis and it demands attention, and particularly in this divisive political time demonstrating common ground among unlikely allies we hope is a way to have this get the attention it deserves."

The coalition's main goal for the time being, he said, will be to get Vermont's law and policy makers to put health care costs at the front of their agendas.

"The fact that we are paying close to double what people pay in Maine, to me, is a very stark parallel," he said.

Ventriss said she was co-chair of a similar group that formed in the early 2000s called Coalition 21. It also worked on health care reform, she said, and benefited from having a large number of diverse viewpoints.

"The trends are continuing to go up, regardless of what data sources you look to," she said, regarding health care costs. "It's really disheartening. It's affecting individual taxpayers, it's affecting school and municipal budgets that get voted down time and time again. And eventually, we will come to a point where some of our smaller systems, possibly, are not going to be able to function."

She said that nobody wants to paint hospitals out to be the "bad guy" and named Rutland Regional Medical Center as an example of a hospital that has done well at improving itself and controlling expenses.

Other members of the leadership council include: Nicole DiVita, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Vermont; Dr. Elliott Fisher; Dimitri Garder, a business leader; Lisa Groeneveld, vice chair of OnLogic; Elizabeth Hunt, chief financial officer of Green Mountain Surgery Center; Dr. Jennie Lowell; Greg Marchildon, state director of AARP Vermont; Lorna Mattern, chief executive officer of United Counseling Services; Chuck Myers, chief executive officer of Northeastern Family Institute Vermont; Win Smith, retired owner of Sugarbush Resort; Bill Stritzler, owner and manager of Smugglers' Notch Resort; Don Tinney, president of VT-NEA; Kathryn Van Haste, and David Young, superintendent of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington.

Cheryl Mitchell is vice chair of the VT Healthcare 911 board of directors; Beth Tanzman is treasurer; Bill Schubart is secretary; while Mark Hage, Dr. Craig Jones, and Tom Rees are listed as trustees.

Owen Foster, chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, which oversees hospital budgets and health insurance carrier rates, said he's heard of the coalition and has skimmed its website.

"I think it speaks to the serious issues we have here in health care that such a group of people from diverse professional backgrounds and across the political spectrum have come together on one issue," he said.

He said GMCB hears from all manner of groups and individuals on health care issues and he looks forward to seeing what this group has to say given the number and broad diversity of experts it has for members.

"We have been acting on these types of issues pretty seriously for a couple of years," he said. "Last year, we reduced (UVM Medical Center's) commercial price by 1%. We have been focusing on improving primary care support and primary care payment through our (accountable care organization) regulation. We have been trying to support and encourage competition to come into the state."

He said care board decisions reducing salaries and other expenses have been appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court in the past, and the board has had some success.

"We were acting on it," he said.

Michael Del Trecco, president and chief executive officer of Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, said he hasn't yet had the chance to look deeply into VT Healthcare 911's numbers but is excited to see how the work called for by Act 167 will play out.

Act 167 is a state law passed in 2022 requiring the Green Mountain Care Board to look at specific ways to make the state's health care system better and less costly.

"They're looking at some of the details of what's happening in each community, more specifically what services are in each community, how they could potentially be changed," said Del Trecco.

He said he expects Vermont's hospitals will be eager to "lean in" on making the care they provide less costly.

keith.whitcomb

@rutlandherald.com