welcome thank you all for coming yes thank you so the legislative session started just blast wednesday and with all the pageantry and everything including the governor's address on thursday and both george and i were appointed to the same committees we have been i'm on human services georgian health care and when i this evening i was thinking that we would you know sort of talk about some of the things we might be thinking about in our committee and open it up for for whatever discussion you have probably along the lines of what's the chance of this getting taken up or what's your feeling on this topic or something and if you run out of ideas i'm sure we can come up with a lot of other ideas and ask you about them because  the ignorant hoarders who refuse to look about old school i don't look at my data or the ignore hoards he was referring to work the common folks of the day they were the leaders they were the intellectual sure insurance company and earlier in munich germany which had written and published some things about the tragic amount of bad weather this country was ha now why would a senator in fact have to reference some insurance company which has motives who try to block the idea that they had storms when in fact we have a hurricane center in washington d c which collects all  coming i emailed markowitz and said you know work in the public look at this and she will be back and so were i could and i did i read the article and it was in fact exactly what the paper had said it was a doomsday here and we're going to have many many many of the worst storms or freedom storms and we need to kind of prepare our state for this there are four references in that document to other documents happening they say the hurricane center shows are declining bernie sanders also said as an example sandy was one of the worst storms ever but if you look at the statistics it didn't hardly make it into a category two storm related to what the category three or four or five it barely made it into the bottom level of category two in terms of the strength of the stor by any measurement and he mentioned several other measurements that affect sandy was not one of the worst storms so we have this set of people including the governor who said we've got to go on with what we're doing with this energy plan because our hair is on fire nobody asked him why is our hair on fire what work is the basis for this information that he thinks he has is it also the  know that it's worse today than it was predicted to be ten years ago another member of the ignores the fact is global warming stopped sixteen years ago if you look at the  nasa's database of temperatures it's stuck into tipped over and it's cloud declining if you look at the last ten years an average is on a downward slope in terms of temperature global temperature there are no such facts any scientific evidence anywhere that can support the conjecture that carbon dioxide in fact is the forcing factors that they claim and the global  all of that data fact his movie was condemned and banned from schools in england because of the exaggeration that he made over what the what the data actually showed so let's can you wrap it up others have a chance sure i'll try to get through this of what point is burlington free press is the fact that surveys show seventy percent of our martyrs support the energy plan that you guys have passed is supported theory as yet and if it isn't that we should be spending our money and putting public policy behind it how many people signed up if you look at it there today the last time i looked at thirty thousand eight hundred  seventy scientists in the us have signed a petition and it isn't easy to do that you just can't go to a website you have to go get a document and submit it with a postage stamp so words bernie think that most people or most scientist are now fleeing like rabbits out of rabbit hole there's another website called climate people that has we documented who these people are and when the scientists have turned around and said no free press provides us in support of this energy plan which is based on training around global warming is because reminders don't get any other information they see bill mckibben getting a four page spread that we refer to people who don't know without you know because i just told you so you are no longer among that group that could be identified therefore i think you've got a responsibility to step forward and do something about it time but they came through this committee and he was the guy who stood on the floor for literally hours into questions about the bill so well that's true i was a reporter when it when i passed out of the human services committee so obviously if i was going to report it i support bill you don't send up for four hours but the the building down past on the floor there were speculation it might sometimes they don't pass a third reading so but this year the bill is is going to be introduced again it hasn't but there there's only been a few bills introduced the the way many bills that get introduced in both the house and the senate is it doesn't make much sense for both the house and senate to be taking up the same bill at the same time and so there's usually an agreement amongst the chairs of committees which side is going to take it up first and i'm pretty sure this year it's going to be the senate because we the house have been the last time is for one reason and there's other reasons you know the rest of what i say i will give you some speculation i think it will be taken up in the senate health and welfare committee i would expect that it will be taken up this year meeting you know the first bayani and that it will and if it passes the senate that most likely it will be put in in human services again you know until it gets assigned you don't know and after it's a sign there's there's always the option to to move it and just because it goes into one committee doesn't mean it won't be taken up in another committee because any committee could ask for a bill to be brought in after it passes one committee support in the senate well those of you that have followed it know that you know the last couple sessions it hasn't had the support to lash here it was you know very close to whether it would pass if it actually got brought up you know it didn't get brought up they got put on as an amendment to a t another bill which irritated some people but it was basically done you know to to keep it on the forefront for those who really supported it and then t could be part of so but anyway so what will happen the senate i really don't know i expect it's going to pass the senate because since i support it i want to pass the senate i want to come to the house and i to to the house to do another searle job of examining at the bill that will be introduced will be virtually the same as the one that passed out of our committee three years ago four years ago whatever was which i think was a very good bill i think it addressed all the concerns that people have about it and for people that supported it if it had all of those points into it so you know how support i don't know i have not talked to new members i have a pretty good idea where you know who supports and who doesn't support it  but no when you go you can go up to somebody and say do you support this bill and just you know sometimes they say to give you the truth sometimes they don't know sometimes they change their mind so so that's where it is so you're support assuming that you're going to tell the truth i'm going to tell the truth and the truth is that you know although i'm somewhat favorably inclined it would depend on the specifics of the bill i would there are some things that would have to change first of all  in my mind i do a survey of physicians every year and this will be a survey again but one of the things that came out when i clued this couple years ago was that most people who responded there were a lot two years ago responded those talks were in support of family practice or primary care docs more so than the specialists not near as many as supported it for willing to participate and there was a sentiment that a number of docs didn't want to this just to be part of standard practice that they want a special rider on your license a special certificate if you are going to be part of a part of of physician assisted suicide which would entail additional education  care and pain management sort of things because i'm going to i'm going to survey docs again this year i'm not going to do that as a proponent or open at the medical society is first of all very heavily technicality based but secondly is a terrible position at this because people get so emotional about it that they will take the same stand they always have which is no nothing for or against it no legislation one way or the other so i think it's important that the you know the docs who be involved with this have a survey and have their numbers put out so i will not be  a sponsor of the bill now ask me who i vote for and the answer is most likely i will if it includes something that i would if it doesn't i'll try to amend it on the floor to include something that has a special certification on your license to get to participate in the program so let's you know the arguments that i often hear against it are slippery slope arguments event that i just would not have imagined could have occurred given our current laws so i don't generally believe in the slippery slope arguments i tell you i have a little more caution about them that i did have forty years ago there was a survey done eight years ago i believe in that time range where we were presented that the results that showed seventy four percent but took the survey supported it like any survey people who are in favor of it you know jumped on the seventy four percent those that are against it you know had problems with the survey i mean the the the usual kind of things like that the there was another survey done about three years later by a different group that showed similar numbers i don't remember the number there it wasn't quite seventy four percent but it definitely was joyous it wasn't last year it was a year before that he had it on his and the results of the statewide results was favorable but not nearly by seventy four percent in in this community if it was about seventy four percent of people that took the doyle survey in jericho in under where you will get watts of people commenting to you that says vote yes or vote no and that doesn't really give you a whole lot of information about how they feel i have talked to some of the people that have called in to the site to the sergeant at arms office and and put some left their phone number and talk to them about it you know because typically well i shouldn't say typically but a lot of times people know what your position is when they call in i mean let's face it at least impinge my case on these kind of things i have always come out in in these meetings and in in the columns i write and tell you how hollow i am and clung to vote on those topics so i you know and i was very clear the first time it came up i had no strong feeling one way or the other was not my radar and so i was a good candidate to sit in the committee and listen to hours and hours of testimony pro and con and make a decision on it and i chose in favor of it and voted that way the first time and then the second time it came up when people asked me if i how i felt about it i continue saying that i supported it but now i would during the testimony if i felt it was different it wasn't that i was listening to both sides to make a decision what i was doing was listening to see if i was going to change my opinion so it's a sort of a different type of you know of process but probably don't know what we are they only knew in the state that has not passed a bill like this and the reason doctors need protection is because in their states doctors have lost their license for treating that i was crazy now there's nothing wrong with this i mean i have been to a doctor after doctor specialist after specialist that told me nothing was wrong with me and so needed to i misstate i need to go to new york and with then i'd say ten to twelve weeks of daily i'd be treatment  was like a new person and i'm a nurse by profession my career basically lost i lost my house as far as out of pocket expenses i mean that's a people need to understand that they would take but they should be treated there is nothing that restricts a doctor in from on it from treating somebody long term if they want to treat them long term there is no threat that some places will be taken away you know we have asked this very clearly of both the medical practice board and of the commissioner of health the folks every precept everyone that i've researched who lost their license there were it was not specifically and only because of lyme disease it was a pattern of practicing outside of the standard guidelines just because i'm talking about not just about lyme disease  get medicine guidelines in general so i don't i don't see the need for the bill their docs if they want to treat long term now could treat long term now but when they read the literature and they see that in the controlled studies there isn't any long term change in the outcome whether you get long term antibiotics or not the recommendations from the  american society of infectious diseases the american academy of neurology because this sometimes affects people's brains in the third group none of them actually suggest treatment  ok so let me interject a different train of thought on this so obviously george knows the medical part of this which i don't know and we have a very active group of people who have have had these experiences so my point of view on this kind of a topic is that i think it's very good to have discussion on topics similar to what les was saying  you know on global warming that is the role of the legislature and that works very well to have discussions like this at the state house because that's where you can get people to come in and the way you do that is to  have the bill taken up you have people come in pro and con yes and no you know and everything else and discuss that and and since there's these  opposite sides you know it's not that you can appease both sides one hundred percent but at least both sides get heard and you have and you get the experts from both sides one other thing is that their group has i think done an excellent job of bringing forth the problem of tip bikes and what to do if you how to recognize when you have a tick bite how to get the tick off and all of those things and since the group was formed the department of health has started also distributing information about it so that is it to me that is extremely important because i swear the whole thing starts and you know if you don't get the tick off properly you know you are subsets of all to up to a lot  worse ok well that is a major problem but it's also a problem if you do see the tech knowing what to do fifty this year and act were eight which was passed by the legislature to midnight and the governor says i really will release it on the twenty four in a speech on the budget he has the information at his disposal there is a law in place of the options for trying to to press that are pretty pretty pretty limited and you know we've heard that we will hear it on the twenty fourth with the rest of the budget information act what it doesn't ask about a report specifically from  also as someone who's in the have i said that with my primary care physician last week and he said bill how much you pay in a month i said five hundred dollars to blue cross blue shield he said i want you to an now or will now who are uninsured now but are in the income levels where they would be eligible for the systems when we go to the federally mandated exchanges starting in january two thousand and fourteen  that this state benefits that they're getting now are better than the subsidies that they're going to get from the federal government the estimate that we've seen is about eighteen million dollars shortfall  i think it's absolutely clear that within that health care committee that that is probably our biggest priority for this year the funding stream that you're talking about the funding report has nothing to do with this that that funding report that you're talking about is for the program called green mountain healthcare which will start in two thousand and seven seventy here ok so it has nothing to do with this with this so but it is i clearly a priority some of us have been advanced funding mechanism for and we're hoping we're going to have forty sponsors for that the funding that in this would be a sugar tax my opinion on taxes is that sugar sweet instrumental in reducing obesity and so that is the funding mechanism that some of us have proposed for this it would raise a penny and i was would raise enough money to keep everybody whole that is my hope the governor has another plan which he has not shared with us yet but will share on the twenty fourth i don't know what that's going to be the only speculation i've heard is a premium and everybody's everybody else's health care premiums and additional charge on health care premiums the governor has been steadfastly against the sugar sweetened beverage tax and i think it has strong support i will not be the primary sponsor of it this year will be a couple people from the ways and means committee which is a good sign on the house side i think we really won't know until push comes to shove with the budget in there you know and really looking for money come back to time so that so that's the first thing ok so so there is a hope that and it is a priority of the health care committee to keep folks in your situation whole second thing is starting in twenty fourteen your cost for drugs we have limited your your out of pocket for drugs for people in vermont there is a new limit coming in of twelve hundred fifty dollars a year of your out of pocket for drugs we passed out last year so thousand dollars a month  should not happen to you ok i mean we we foresaw this problem coming in and took sort of preemptive action there so a little strange to my primary programs these policies go on sale come october and they start january first of two thousand and fourteen so that to get the full and the federal subsidies go up to about four hundred percent of federal poverty level so family of four that's right now about seventy two or seventy three thousand dollars but to get there subsidies for out of pocket expenses and subsidies for premiums to get the whole range of subsidies if you qualify financially you have to be in the silver plan you can get premium subsidies in any of the plans but you could only get the caution subsidies in the silver plan so i think most people will probably end up there so also promote has a history of when there is something that comes along basically from the federal government that changes a plan and we were people were going to get last that we have made it up and one of the latest examples of that was when medicare part d came along that was a very big problem because the for mot pharmacy plan was i should say much better but it did provide more and we we made whole on the people that were in the other plant and i and that's a history that vermont has of taking care of of people and i expect that to continue and i think most legislators do also now does that mean that there's a plan in place or you don't we decided that's not it hasn't in fact the medicaid part deep thing that all got together like in the last two weeks before it started you know until you know we knew exactly what the problem issues oh the state i'm a little worried we're with the direction we're going i'm i'm just d s t maybe as the legislature consider send taking a  putting together a proposal list of governors push it off for another year and stuff this time stayed mandate is a federal mandate well i know it's a federal mandate but not every state is also doing it right that the that was the federal government preparing for the federal government will impose their own exchange if a state doesn't do so we don't matter that we're not the democratic governors association can go to the president for the next four years and say can we get an extension for a year you know in the same report he said you're not going to get a decision for at least a year on this case you know every member who's out there you know i've started john campbell's office today to see if they were going to bring it up in the in the senate this year that thing the legislation but he was busy as i left the building and because you know if it's going to come up but it's been a couple it's been two years and i do want to ask questions about it again you know it's you know i the first year came up questions myself last year i open it up to other people in my committee and agreement and care board is there stuff that they want to know because there's no other mechanism for getting to every place and start going from our so so we'll see what you know what we come up with this year so you know a few weeks from now because where it's dangerous and even if we were able to do that the question is would you want to market is stay away and if so what language would you use because in ten thousand years and now people might go in mind th so also in this interim period entergy is not doing the investments and upgrades that they understand it's necessary to keep the plant open for another twenty years as well as anyone one else understand this if you if you think you might be shut down why are you going to dump millions of dollars and into these upgrades and so if the upgrades were some of them or definitely for safety and if you shut down the mine yankee you're not going to make up for it you can put all winter but you one of those who tops it's not going to help so we need to do something if we're going to shut it down so you have a perfectly good facilities that listen that the question is is there a decent one and i think this is where it becomes it is there is disagreement over what the energy plan is there there's no doubt about that and  i think we need to go back and look you know when we signed the first deal with hydro come back that that brought in one basically one third of the power we needed and we had a a contract with vermont yankee at that time for approximately one third and when vermont yet but the contract with the yankees only went through last march you know it ended at last march and if you remember there was a lot of discussion about the vermont power companies negotiating with for a month yankee for continuing that contractor or not continuing it getting a new contract and they didn't they never came into a long term large agreement because of all the things that go on basically was  yankee was charging a lot more than they did before i mean that but to put it simply so the the fact that vermont yankee at one time produced about one third of the power that we use it no longer does that and the lights are still on so from one point of view do we need vermont yankee to keep the lights on in vermont now that i'm not so that that's what that's the energy part of it is not that that doesn't address the jobs and the taxes they pay i mean that that's separate but but just for the  for the vermont utilities chose to go to a different direction and the direction was less dependence on for my yankee a little more dependence on hi back not a whole lot more than a third but a bit more and then a mixture of that other thing you know that the rest of it and some of the power companies have chosen to go with the turbans they've also chosen to put up solar panels and the majority and you know there is other energy produced in vermont besides for my yankee that's part of it and the rest of it is on the open market the open market right now last year when the when the discussion was about vermont yankee closing and everything and how can we do this because of the cheap power they do you could actually buy power on the open market for less than we're paying energy for it so you know this all changes you know daily prices cost where you get it from so now do we have a very good long range energy plan i don't think we do i think we're still working on it and i think part of this is because we had this period of time where we had such we were getting so much power from from two major sources that it just didn't get developed at that time now do we need one absolutely i mean the last governor said it the current governor said it and probably the previous government said it too but but it just hasn't it hasn't happened so the temporary bandung big wind farm right now or where do you stand on that i don't think is necessary companies to see if this is a good way to produce power to put the to put the wind turbines up and i think that we have now a couple wind farms three four whatever it ruin a mountain top you can't put it back the reason i say that is the stuff that i've looked at there's vermont a really bad place for wind for a couple reasons one you don't get they just leave them standing there and well that's what's going to happen in vermont yeah because look what they do with the farmers out in the midwest is you know most investment wind farms are twenty year payback so the investors get their money back in twenty years is if you're not going to get a huge amount of power from a particular source that we need a balance of power i mean i think wind has to be part of that solar for us we parted biomass has to be part of that hydro has to be part of it i mean i mean it i mean pretty much you go through every every source there is somebody who opposes it right thinking that still it doesn't matter what sort of like truth we all want to live with the electricity but i do know you can't find a single source that that there's nobody who objects to me there are people who object to the hydro stuff you know that damage to the land took away the native peoples lands up in the back i mean but but we need the power they do just isn't a perfect source so we need a mixture of them so and i agree with bill i don't think there's going to be widespread wind farms here you know i don't mean that i've done fortunate moments for a couple hours the other data to sit and look at some wind turbines up in fairfax when my car died on the keypad from say all the time i got to sit there for a couple hours and i've never found them offensive looking you know ways to drive through them in california when i lived in san francisco my i guess probably not there i don't know why but every year i have been in the legislature there have been bills introduced about the bottle deposit a variety of bills but basically it's expanding it you know to include all the additional things that are put in the same kind of bottle that sodas put in and it just never seems to generate the what it takes to get to get past there also builds on the other side saying get rid of the all of the there are those who don't want it spanned it because of the the what it takes to take that many more bottles in because i don't know if this is the right number but i would guess that if we expanded it we could double the number of bottles that you put the deposit on i mean so if you're doubling the number of bottles you put the positive on that means you have to double the amount of space to take them back you know kind of thing and so there's that there's a group that doesn't like it because at that that there is those people who say that it really doesn't serve the purpose anymore that it was originally set up for and so we should be more concerned with just recycling up which is basically what you do you know you take a back and you're recycling the bottle you know after you get your nickel back and it just is one of those things that shift doesn't garner the support amongst the committees that take it up and you're right i agree with you it just seems you be on that did that yeah i agree i mean if i have to fall out of my mind i will tell you that i always supported expanding the bottle the possum because i'm from the point of view of why we did in the first place you know we did it to keep bottles off the road and to keep the litter off the road and to also do the recycling of the bottles so this this was a good thing and i always saw it as a great money maker for small organisations or large organisations who ever did it you know the boy scouts of little leagues and things like that so i was always in favor of it and could never understand why we couldn't get it through until you know you start talking to the other side or you start talking to the groups that are different and you know you talk to them you don't agree with it you know it's not it's not your point of view but you understand  you know that there are other points of view on this so i agree it so now my point is is that we either should expand it to include all bottles or we should get rid of it you know this halfway in between h something i have to say they found which is just there is nothing which is not controversial and there's just nothing i mean i put my name the first year on a bill to get rid of toxic chemicals in children's i don't usually think of lead bullets as a child's product but only after a specific part of the bill was put in to say that this does not mean to include lead bullets but i mean i was just shocked that i mean but it just goes to show that to just nothing that is diciples a seems one step on just that it just doesn't happen so this is interesting about the film but there are there is another but there is that taking this up and we're we're getting near the end of it i mean you know you take testimony and you hear things and you know there's a process that you go through when a sportsman club  executive director whoever it was came in to the committee one day and he was concerned about a portion of the bill because the way he wrote it it was possible that lead weight cars could be banned and that is what a lot of sportsmen use who was called make their own their own their own ammunition  does so we did write a we added a statement that this isn't going to affect it i mean it wasn't going to i mean i with the numbers so i never thought of it but and a couple years later and fish wildlife there was a bill and i don't have i don't remember the bill and all but the same topic came up and  and remember a fish wildlife and i carpool together and he was talking about the fact that this was a concern among sportsman's and i said ok and so we went and got the other bill and took the same statement because it was you know basically said that this doesn't affect it and pulled it out and put it in and in it i mean it took care of it but the point is not that we didn't want you don't it's not that we don't want to take care of everybody's concern is just that you have some concerns that you don't know about i can tell you i mean when one of the things that troubles me is i mean that's what keeps me up at night is that you know this healthcare system fact that this is coming down the pike like a train really technology you know so so that's that's what we're what worries me you know and so we have the issue of the exchange coming down but i the other issues that that worry me are just what we're doing about the health care costs you know consistently what we hear is well there's going to be all these administrative savings from a single payer system those are highly overblown in my opinion they didn't use from our numbers when they calculated they use national numbers telling us that each doc was spending sixty eight thousand dollars on building things when i was in practice of seven and we did spend sixty eight thousand dollars among the seven of us right so they use just way outta line numbers and yet consistently there's been opposition to doing things that would reduce health care costs have been opposition from the administration i was just sugar sweetened beverage tax there's been resistance about a big increase in and cigarette tax the kind of increase that would take to really reduce kids smoking and stop a sixty year olds from smoking with that but you know kids so i get we got this obesity epidemic coming we still we still have twenty percent of vermont adults smoking i mean we have these things that we're just not addressing the fundamental issues and i mean that that's what keeps  night the fact that we just can't seem to get traction in the administration to do things that we actually need to do to reduce the health care cost and some of them he thinks yeah what's he going to say when you  committee anybody thinks we can get ten million or twenty two million dollars from a dollar a pack cigarette tax must be smoking something stronger than tobacco i think was one of the to well publicized and famous statements that you know we always get to this story about cross border issues and you know the polling on the sugar sweet beverage says pretty clearly the people in the eastern side of the state don't see this is a big is a big issue you know the the people who live over there are going to drive across the river to go get a soda i think they're just not going to do that but i typically don't get a response when i when i raise the these points  you know so people within new straits will say i agree but i have a boss i think in this is my ninth here now the thing of all that time that that was most concerning to me was last year after irene when the state hospital was destroyed and finding places for people with mental illnesses to be housed temporarily and especially for acute care and those and working to come up with a plan for a new state hospital that not only would solve the needs of all vermonters all for monsters who needed acute care but also be affordable as in the right word but you know that within the range that we could afford and this was this was one of those issues where  the need was there everyone knew there was a need but identify the exactly what the need was and how to solve it was it in a so it was this double thing going on coming up with the plans for a new hospital and what to do in the interim until the new hospital is built and there's a lot of problems you know that what you're allen had took people that had problems there are other other hospitals around and this constant constant of every day coming up with a new problem in this area i think it took a larger toll on the human services committee than anything else we have we have worked on and yeah every member wanted to come back this year and continue work so do it's not like you you know you walk away from it and say you know i'm not going to do it again we need to we need to get this solved and there are there think that in the next two years that we will be discussing it you know having a good discussion on what to do right now there is no bill big magazines i think it's over ten ten shots in the magazines and the closing of the gun show loophole so that background checks would be required all gun sales i think that's the essence of that seems to aggressive well well it is see this is this is where you get it i love it well i know see this is what it is is that you have people on  multiple sides under this issue i mean and so in order to to really do something you you have to come to an agreement of what you're going to do before you just throw a bill out there like that and for example i don't know how many emails have you gotten already the senate bill i haven't looked today so i don't know three or four today so you know and the bill was introduced on friday i may be part of the bill in the house which will be some of the same stuff but it will have several other facets number one that will allow suppressor silencers in the state for some bizarre reason we don't allow suppressors in the state and everything i understand about them is they actually make their shooting more accurate you know than it's not obvious to me why we don't have suppressors here and that's one thing the second thing that hopefully will be in the house bill is some money for shooting ranges we have private shooting ranges of a very few of them meet the n r a standards and so i think the state ought to step up and help the shooting ranges meet the n r a safety standards and so you know that hope i think is going to be in the house a bill in the house