I am writing in response to a letter in the Burlington Free Press of Feb. 26 by Diane Ballou who asked how our new health care system is going to be financed before the election. “I have a suspicion that our new health care system is going to be impossible,” she wrote. To answer Ballou’s question we are already financing it to the tune of $5 billion a year, soon to be $6 billion, with costs rising by a $1 million a day.
What is impossible is for the state of Vermont to keep going along this highly unsustainable road for much longer before we hit the dead end of bankruptcy. The money is already there. It is just not going to the health of Vermonters. What we need is to put what we are spending into a single pipeline that makes, at last, health care truly a public good for all Vermonters.
WALTER CARPENTER
Montpelier