One of the initiatives to come out of the Gov. Peter Shumlin administration was a dramatic overhaul of the state’s health care payment system, now known as OneCare. But’s its struggling to move forward, and one well-known critic says the system is overrun by bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.
In an effort to make health care more affordable, Vermont backed a private company’s mission to create a new system that pays health care providers in monthly payments using a mix of funds from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance companies. The idea has been to focus on quality of care overall, not payments based on individual services offered to patients — the traditional fee-for-service model.