Court hearing
Semi-charmed
Police officer accused of killing cyclist with cruiser is arraigned
Redhawks again make penultimate game, but fall short of title try
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Volume 54 Number 12
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shelburnenews.com
March 20, 2025
Law aims to regulate hospitals’ spending BRIANA BRADY STAFF WRITER
The Senate Committee on Health and Welfare moved a bill on Friday that aims to regulate hospital spending and, through that, bring down insurance premiums. The bill aligns broadly with recommendations made in a report from the Green Mountain Care Board in December that outline the implementation of reference-based pricing, a model that would use Medicare rates as a baseline for the cost of hospital services. While the bill is focused on the hospital infrastructure in Vermont, the stated goal of bringing down premiums speaks to the budgeting crunch that local municipalities and school districts have been under due to rising healthcare costs. At Champlain Valley School District’s annual legislative breakfast last week, Chittenden Southeast Sen. Virginia “Ginny” Lyons, D-Williston, brought up the bill as a part of the solution for rising budget costs — the bulk of municipal and school budgets pay for staff compensation. Lyons is the chair of the Senate health committee. According to Gary Marckres, the chief operating officer for the Champlain Valley School District, the district’s cost for a family plan has more than doubled from $17,000 to $40,000 over
the last few years. Although the district achieved an overall budget increase of less than one percent for next fiscal year, it will be eliminating nearly 40 staff positions. Similarly, about 75 percent of the increase in South Burlington School District’s FY26 budget expenditures were due to an 11 percent increase in their health care costs. And in Shelburne, the selectboard considered asking employees to pay into their health care benefits for the first time to balance the almost 12 percent raise in costs they were experiencing. According to the Green Mountain Care Board report from December, reference-based pricing could ease these financial burdens by “lowering prices paid on services, thereby reducing the need to increase taxes or reduce benefits to ensure the future solvency of the funds.” As written in the bill, this would involve the state regulating some of what has been a private process: negotiations between hospitals and insurance companies. “The contracts between hospitals and insurers and payers are in a black box. They’re not transparent. We don’t see them. So first of all, reference-based pricing is a way of saying, ‘This is how much you get paid at this level with respect to Medicare,’” Lyons said in an interview Friday. See HEALTH CARE on page 12
PHOTO BY BRIANA BRADY
AnnMarie Anderson makes a point about the role of fiction in portraying characters readers can connect with.
Adults become learners at book reading BRIANA BRADY STAFF WRITER
Last Friday morning, in a classroom at Shelburne Community School, a different kind of class was in session. A group of adults — a mix of parents, teachers, and community members — sat in a circle and scribbled away on the note cards in their laps. While the morning had started with pie and gabbing, the room was quiet while everyone gathered their thoughts. Prompted by Champlain Valley
Union High School social studies teacher Brad Miller, each person wrote down three questions about the book they had all read: the young adult novel “Gather,” written by Vermont principal Kenneth Cadow from the perspective a 16-year old boy living in rural Vermont dealing with poverty and his mother’s substance abuse. Miller was there to facilitate discussion; the adults weren’t just going to hear about a book district students had read, they were going to participate.
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The community discussion was organized by Christina Daudelin, the DEI Coach at Shelburne Community School, and Shelburne parent Wendy Eberhart. The book, which is the current Vermont Humanities’ Vermont Reads book, was one of the two common texts for Champlain Valley Union High School’s faculty this year as well as classroom reading for some of Shelburne’s 7th and 8th graders. See BOOK GROUP on page 12