The House Health Care Committee and Senate Health and Welfare Committee met jointly last week to hear an update on strategies for future expansions of health care coverage under consideration and development by legislative staff and consultants working with the legislature’s Commission on Health Care Reform.

The commission has identified five themes for exploration, including expanding affordable coverage to more Vermonters, reducing the rate of cost increases while improving quality, using information technology as a catalyst for reform, ensuring an appropriate delivery system capacity, and assessing the capability of the system to implement rapid change.

Projections developed by legislative analysts suggest that, even with optimistic assumptions, the plan for addressing the uninsured through Catamount Health as it is currently designed will fall 23,000 people short of the legislative goal to insure 96 percent of the state’s population by 2010.

Members of the two committees attending Thursday’s joint hearing were asked to react to a presentation by consultant Ken Thorpe of Emory University on options for expanding Catamount Health to include a phase-in of the individual and small group markets. Thorpe suggested ways to accomplish that goal without disruptions to the new Catamount Health plan for the uninsured. Most members who commented on the presentation supported expansion of Catamount or even more aggressive steps for a complete overhaul of the health care financing and delivery system.

The legislative Commission on Health Care Reform will meet Tuesday afternoon to continue its work and to plan an agenda for an upcoming public hearing scheduled for the evening of April 24^th at the State House. 

In other activity last week, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee continued to learn about H.531, a House-passed bill directed at advancing the Blueprint for Health chronic care initiative, establish various pilot projects around provider reimbursement systems, and create a health information technology fund to implement electronic medical records.

The House Health Care Committee spent most of its week deliberating the issues around a Senate-passed prescription drug bill, S.115.

For more information on legislative proposals, visit the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont website at www.bcbsvt.com or call Leigh Tofferi at (802) 223-6131 or Kathy Parry at (802) 371-3205. If you wish to discontinue receiving these updates or know of anyone else who would like to receive it, please call Kathy Parry or send an e-mail to parryk@bcbsvt.com