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We have turned health care into a business relationship — just a product the consumer is buying from a system selling it for the highest price that it can get for it.
Charges that patients see bear very little resemblance to the actual cost of delivering a specific service. For too long, we have allowed health care institutions to conflate charges with costs. This has resulted in the current health care financial environment.
Key steps: Bring more rationality and accountability to hospital prices and expenditures with global budgets, eliminate or curtail surplus accumulation by hospitals, reduce the volume of practices that land people in emergency rooms and hospital beds, and compel the drug industry to negotiate lower prices.
Vermont has sidelined issues of affordability, price, avoidable hospital care, emergency room overutilization, and the importance of enhanced community-based services.
Ben & Jerry’s provoked a firestorm last month when it announced its would end sales to “Occupied Palestinian Territory." A statement released at the