Gov. Peter Shumlin Tuesday appointed Anya Rader Wallack, the consultant who has been leading the design of a single-payer health care system for Vermont, to chair the new, five-member Green Mountain Care Board that will oversee management of the health care system in the state.
The new board will continue to design some aspects of the proposed single-payer system, but will also assume ultimate responsibility for the functions now carried out by the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care administration (BISHCA). Those include the establishment of hospital budgets, as well as authorizing the addition of capital projects or new services in those hospitals.
Wallack, the chair, will be a full-time state employee with a salary of $122,866 per year. The other four board members will serve at an 80 percent level at annual salaries of $81,910. They are:
[2]Al Gobeille, of Shelburne, owns several restaurants in Chittenden County. He is a Selectman in Shelburne and has been active in the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce and is a member Vermont’s health care payment reform advisory committee. He also serves on the board of the Visiting Nurses Association.
[3]Karen Hein, MD, of Jacksonville. Hein is a pediatrician who was based for many years at Columbia University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she conducted extensive research on adolescent HIV/AIDS. She has also served as executive officer of the national Institute of Medicine where she oversaw a number of medical quality initiatives as well as efforts to improve health care quality. Her latest post was president of the William T. Grant Foundation. Hein has had a home in Jacksonville for the last 30 years and has lived there full time for the last seven.
[4]Cornelius Hogan of Plainfield, who has served in a number of management posts in both private industry and state government. Hogan began his career in the Corrections Department of state government, then spent 11 years as president of International Coins and Currency, a Montpelier firm. He later served as secretary of the Agency of Human Services under Govs. Richard Snelling and Howard Dean. He has written widely on health policy issues.
[5]Allan Ramsay, MD, a Fletcher Allen Health Care primary care physician who lives in Essex Junction. Ramsay has been a professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Family Medicine since 1980 and is currently director of Fletcher Allen’s Palliative Care Service. He has been a leader in developing assurances that patients’ wishes will be honored at the end of their lives.
The new board will assume its duties on Oct. 1. The board will not be involved in the establishment of the budgets for the state’s 14 hospitals for the fiscal year 2012, which begins the same day. The decisions on the 2012 hospital budgets will be made by the current BISHCA commissioner, Steve Kimbell.
Kimbell will remain at BISHCA, managing the department’s responsibilities in the areas of banking, insurance and securities. BISHCA will continue to provide staff support to the Green Mountain Board on health care issues.