A lawyer with deep experience in the pharmaceutical industry is taking the helm of Vermont's Green Mountain Care Board, the regulator charged with controlling healthcare costs and charting a course to single payer.
Susan Barrett, public policy director for the Bi-State Primary Care Association, serving Vermont and New Hampshire, will take over as executive director of the Green Mountain Care Board on Nov. 18, replacing Georgia Maheras, another lawyer who'll continue working with the board designing actual single payer policy proposals through the federally-funded state innovation model project.
At the Bi-State Primary Care Association since 2011, Barrett has represented primary care providers and federally-qualified health clinics while also working on health reform issues like accountable care. Previously, she worked in sales, management and policy for pharmaceutical companies, most recently between 2009 and 2011 in Novartis' vaccines and diagnostics division, with a focus on expanding access to meningitis vaccinations.
Barrett started her career as a sales representative for Wyeth in 1992, leaving in 1997 to work as a hospital representative for Merck, later promoting the asthma drug Singulair and negotiating vaccine contracts with Vermont's immunization program, hospitals, and other payers and providers. She also helped push for school immunization mandates for the varicella virus that causes chicken pox.
At the Green Mountain Care Board, a quasi-governmental independent overseer, Barrett will lead a five member board, among them two doctors, a nurse, a hospitality business owner and a former human services agency director. And she'll be working on what many single payer advocates see as the vanguard of health reform in the country.
"Having attended GMCB meetings and participated in working groups, I have seen how the GMCB has already begun to improve Vermont's health care landscape," Barrett said in a media release.
The path towards single payer in Vermont is far from clear, however; the general goal is to have the state government as the main underwriter for residents. Single payer proposals may debut in the next few years, ahead of the 2017 date that states will be allowed to pursue federal waivers for universal coverage policies under the Affordable Care Act.
Already, though, the Green Mountain Care Board is flexing its muscle as a central authority, last year reviewing and approving budgets for the state's 14 hospitals and setting target increases for net patient revenue of 3.75 percent for the 2013 fiscal year, down from 4.5 and 4 percent during the past two years.
The board also developed its role in setting insurance rates in 2012, reviewing, approving or modifying the decisions of the Department of Financial Regulation, with two insurers now competing in the state's insurance exchange -- the only source for Vermonters to buy individual or small group coverage.