Democratic Primaries

1. Vermont insisted on platinum-plated insurance coverage

2. ‘We can move full speed ahead…without knowing where the money’s coming from’

3. The Vermont plan would have required a 160 percent tax increase

4. Hospitals and insurance companies had every reason to fight the plan

“What I learned the hard way,” Shumlin said, “is it isn’t just about reforming the broken payment system. Public financing will not work until you get costs under control.”

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“I see no evidence from the Medicare-for-all advocacy community of a serious effort to understand and learn from the lessons from Vermont’s failure,” said John McDonough, who was a senior aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and is now a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Those who ignore history are cursed to repeat it.”

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By then, the computer runs kept showing that the only way to set taxes at rates as low as they were striving for was to provide skimpier coverage than most insured Vermonters already had.