good evening and welcome i'm diane meyerhoff host for tonight's candidate forum for chittenden county state senate today show is being aired live on channel seventeen and streamed live on the channel seventeen website we welcome your comments and questions please join the conversation at eight six two three nine six six that shouldn't count the senate delegation is made up of six candidates succeeds as such will be talking to each candidate i'm in three separate groups tonight right now joining me are democratic incumbent debbie ingram fair representation vermont candidate joshua knox democratic incumbent jenny lyons and republican paul ding thank you all so much for joining us tonight it's ramstein of course the ground rules for tonight's for is that the candidates will make opening statements of up to two minutes each then they will answer prepared questions also for two minutes with a possible one minute rebuttal we'd like the candidates in the opening statements to talk about why they're running and the experience that my name is debbie ingram and i am a current state senator i serve on the health and welfare committee and on the education committee there are issues that are of particular interest to me i also bring  experience from the municipal realm i served on the walls will instance like for for six years and the wilson planning commission for five years and on the to the county regional planning commission and in my day job i am the executive director of a nonprofit called vermont interfaith action which is a grassroots coalition of caring and inclusive congregations that work together to effect systemic change around issues of social justice so through that work i have acquired quite a bit of knowledge in affordable housing and health care transportation education criminal justice reform and economic dignity so with all of those different different hats i feel that i bring quite a lot of experience and knowledge to the state senate and i also have the opportunity to really listen to every day vermonters on the ground at the grassroots and i think that's something that is very important i've always had a heart for justice and a lot of compassion for people and what they go through and i think that's a very important part of my role in the senate there in my opinion we're all there to contribute to our communities but to make the lives of vermonters better and that's what i'm trying to do thank you josh welcoming statement yes hi i'm joshua knox of course running for  i'd like to thank the other candidates for being here this is a great excuse me a great forum for democracy we like that form for democracy trade market i'd like to thank my wife melanie and my son effort for letting me up and our family schedule again running around the county here we are again so i'm running to bring more voices to the state legislature in my day job i am a teacher at mt mansfield union high school in the  i've been on the ethics planning commission now for about five years and between those two things well i'll talk about being a teacher first if you're a teacher for any amount of time what you become is sort of a sounding board you become a willing  you become almost a confessional and so there's a lot of stories and voices that i hear on on a regular basis that i don't necessarily necessarily hear reflected in our politics and we often say in education that every social issue comes through our door first and they all come in together and so when i think of the issues we're going to talk about when i talk about opioids or affordable housing or how to make for mont a better state  i don't think of statistics i don't think of anecdotes i think of faces of students and friends and neighbors and it's about it's about stories for me and weaving those stories into a narrative about who we are as a state who we can be for this generation and generations to come thank you great thank you ginny opening statement thank you thank you diane thanks to channel seventeen this is a terrific opportunity for not only for us sitting at the table but also for the folks out in the in the audience and we greatly appreciate being able to share with our constituents i am in the senate now and i look forward to being back in the senate in january and i would ask for your vote i'll do that up front you know my experience came from big on my school board and then serving for nearly ten years as chair of the williston select board when we went through some very difficult that divided the town around development and i think most people are familiar with the wilston tough corners area that was such a difficult time not not not just for me but for everyone in town and it took a lot of energy on my part to bring people together when you're sitting on a select board you're not sitting as a democrat or republican are progressive or an independent you're sitting as a citizen trying to bring that make the community a healthy environment so that's part of my experience another part of my experience of course has been in the senate and i look forward to talking more about that as we go through the program also have  served as a professor of biology at trinity college in burlington for over twenty seven years and got to know not just burlington but also the issues that are intrinsic to  biology and the environ all of the social issues that we face today whether it's addiction whether all of our public health issues are really embedded in our environmental ethic and in our interest  in science and natural resources so i bring a lot of experience from my background working with those in the social sciences as well as those in the natural sciences  in a very practical way to the senate and i look forward to going back and representing the citizens who i listen to year round through email or meetings and thank you so it's good to be groceries and being able to walk to work and so i realize how important it is to have a walkable city in burlington then once i got married my wife and i moved out to essex junction where we lived for eight years all three of our kids were born while we were out there so i also understand  and i've seen unfortunately a lot of my clients who are getting to retirement looking at the cost of living on a fixed income and some people can't do it anymore and and i want to continue to serve people here in vermont and want well that love vermont to be able to stay here if they like the warm weather that's fine but that's not the only reason and so i want to make sure that we keep vermont a place that folks can stay and i served while i was in essex i served epidemic it's one of those areas that i know that if we can be intelligent be smart be careful and compassionate about it's an area that we can see a lot of progress in in other areas the second issue which is also related to that here that give us all in the billet to put food on the table and enjoy the recreation in vermont that those employers stay here and expand and so those are the two key reasons i'm running to get promoted from the house to the senate with your help thank you very much let's talk about the economy according to forbes magazine author monts economic outlook is projected to be the second worst in the united states in the next five years while income growth is also expected to lag behind do you agree with this assessment and what is your plan of action to strengthen the months economic outlook and we can start with josh i do agree with that and i have since i was running i've gotten a lot of e mails facebook messages twitter whatever from former students who would have loved to stay in vermont but were unable to and so i entirely agree with that i think one of the traps we sort of get into in vermont is and both parties do this but they tend to try to play catch up with bigger states and what i mean by that is about offering a better deal for businesses to come here and my view is that we can always be under t if you will in the race to the bottom vermont going to lose it's a small state it's a brave little state but it's a small state and so there's that difficulty so my my approach is sort of the two pronged one would be to make it easier for people to stay here on the labor side of things and i hope w talk about are things like before double child care early childhood education making those things affordable for working vermonters because you need a workforce that willing to put down roots or people that are willing to put down roots here that's one side of it the other side and i think we'll probably talk about as well is the entrepreneurial culture we're not like i said going to attract large businesses necessarily of the old type i don't think that's necessarily what vermont strength is going to be but i think our strength is a local entrepreneurial culture from which we can build up and you see that in sort of our agricultural products like i'm a fan of the sort of cider boom revolution we have going on things like that that's going to be the vermont future some small niche thing that amount does well and that's when you support ok great we're talking about ball about the future and sort of i don't know how predictive is based on the work that we've done recently so you know i i think that vermont is low more resilient than saying that we're we're go fail over the next five years and we're going to be second lowest maybe we will i am not willing to give into that thinking i think that we have a lot of challenges there's no doubt about it i do think that some of the commas we hear about keeping young people in the state are pretty pretty right on but on the other hand we've seen a remarkable growth in our solar industry not just putting the panels up and having the work force to do that but also in the production of solar product as well as other energy products we have wonderful biotech companies including one right across the bridge here in when you ski so and we have maker hubs beginning  across the state we know that we have telecommunications that is lagging but we're focusing that telecom in specific areas so that we can build that telecom telecom industry in a way that is for months specific small business specific we've we've invested in our working landscapes through the enterprise board we're diversifying our agriculture we have wonderful small businesses that are selling butter to restaurants in new york and beef to new york to high end restaurants so vermont the label vermont is and of itself i'm not willing to give up on vermont over the next five years so you can see that i'm very high on our state but i i do think that the challenges that we face in terms of childcare in our past budget we added we increased the earned income tax credit for folks with kids so that it would be now thirty six percent of federal level instead of thirty two percent so people will have some benefit to invest in their and their young kids and i'm going to stop you there ok i mean we could go on for you know i think that we're a little more resilient than saying what the article has said and i love to see the appear but that doesn't mean that there aren't barriers that can be frustrating for minors i think you know for things off the top of my head that i think could improve the business climate and therefore the economy is looking at addressing  the cost of like tricity i just had somebody come to look at our house and looking for solar panels and they told me that vermont is the fifth most expensive utility rates in the country it's hard to attract business here with a number like that so we've got to make sure that we're looking at policies that are producing a competitive environment where we can get our utility rates across the board whether you're a big company like global foundries in my home problem we've got a big hole in the middle of downtown burlington because of issues related to her meeting process and investors don't understand what the process looks like how do we move forward when can we move forward it's just it's too complicated the in my backyard again in essex you've got other circumvention highway i mean you know you have a problem when the state starts building a road that it doesn't know that it can't finish the permitting process is too complicated second thing we third thing we need to do is make sure we're increasing wages for monitors it's really easy to say hey we're going to try to raise the minimum wage but that only helps the people at the bottom i think if we can make vermont a place that's a more robust vibrant economy we can  create more opportunities where companies are competing for wages that's going to bring wages up for everybody low middle and upper class and the fourth thing is personal experiences helping sole proprietors move from zero employees to one if we can do that simple thing help every sole proprietor who is working just by themself whether you're a plumber electrician you don't have somebody to manage your schedule do your books being able to go from zero employees to one can make a huge impact in those services becoming available to a  greater group of vermonters and providing jobs and helping that individual focus on what they're good at i know for me it was a big step and i hired my first employee earlier this year probably something i should've done a year and a half ago but there was a big concern about all the regulations  and restrictions that would be on me when i went from zero employees to one and they were going to make that a smoother transition for sole proprietors thank you and debbie we're talking about strengthening vermont's economy as well i didn't actually look at the the forbes article figures but i do think there are things that we can do to both to address both parts of what you mentioned which is to make a better business climate but also to address the stagnant wages in terms of helping our businesses are small businesses i think especially flourish because i agree that we're not a prime site for a large manufacturing companies but when i talk to small business owners i hear from them that they're going to three things that they wish were improved in vermont one is it's very difficult for them to find skilled laborers and i think that's partly because vermont is actually dead last in the nation in spending on our community and state colleges  and i think we should invest more money in that to help our vermont for my young people get the skills that they need for the for good jobs secondly our housing is so expensive it makes it difficult for businesses to recruit and retain workers when people are paying more than thirty percent or more even sometimes more than fifty percent on their housing they don't have this isn't a good place for them to live so we need to work on that more and then thirdly i our infrastructure br defined needs to be improved i think we're making some strides but we need to continue to look at the energy sector our utilities our telecommunications especially to our rural areas and our and our roads and then on the other side of the equation looking at our wages they have indeed stagnated which makes it very very difficult for our economy to grow and that's why the majority party supported and passed raising a minimum the minimum wage gradually over several years but to get to fifteen dollars an hour and you know it's very unfortunate the governor vetoed that i think that's that's definitely a measure that we need to use to help the monitors and help our economy ok thank you let's  turn over to health care how do we limit health care spending in vermont while also remaining one of the healthiest states in the nation and didn't even start south ok thank you you know as as vice chair of the health and welfare committee  been working very hard on this issue also a member of the finance committee so it's a challenge actually to look at how do you contain costs at the same time improving quality but we know that we've made great strides not the least of which and there's some controversy about this of course but having the accountable care organization through in our in our area through our medical center the u v s medical center and knowing that now the medical center is not only taking care to care for people who are in the hospital but we're also seeing an extension of care so when people leave and they have to go home there's a place for them so our visiting nurse association has become very much involved our choices for care program where people are can stay at home or go to the go home and receive care so that increased quality of care and at the same time a shorter stay in the hospital that just does save money so though and the sash program of car of course which is really important especially again for those who are in our affordable housing  environment but i do think that so many things that we've done like tele health where folks are monitored for their health offsite or telemedicine where people actually can access a physician's office offsite so they physician is sitting in his office in the patient is another far far away getting care and that saves travel time and it does overall save money  the most one of the more significant things that we've done in this state is something called the blueprint for health which looks across which is a chronic care initiative and has built i think for a real opportunity around primary care so as we build primary care and preventive care for every single age group then we're saving money on those chronic conditions that might emerge later on including heart disease or diabetes so this is this is exciting it's a national nationally recognized program that we have developed and i think is going to allow for us to expand into primary care we're working on things like prescription drug cost of delivery you know we talk about different payment models and all we're doing is kind of playing a shell game and pass the buck if the cost of going to the doctor if the cost of the treatment out that your goes up doesn't matter who's paying for it we're all going to be paying more  we need to make sure that we do the things that have proven to to bring prices down that's present patients with more choice allow them to have greater choices in terms of how they they manage their primary care whe they do it under regular fee for service model that's great if they want to be part of like a concierge service if that's appropriate for them and their particular health needs allowing them to do that also allowing folks to figure out what kind of insurance makes sense for them unfortunately vermont is the only state in the country that makes it illegal to buy health insurance outside the exchange why are we limiting people's choices yeah the exchange have a good robust plan but some people don't want that some people want  best parts of health care in government is vermont's choices for care model that addresses long term care needs for vermonters that's something that's working well that people are happy with that program it's reducing cost and more importantly than reducing costs it's helping vermonters get the treatment in the setting that they want and that they're comfortable with and the folks who like that program are happy with their program very concerned about the changes that could come with that it's one of the problems of kind of doing a throwing the baby out with the bathwater and trying to remake the system top down is that we have parts that are working well especially for elderly remodels we've got to make sure that we maintain that for them so i think it's basically providing more choices for patients and  make sure we understand what we're doing well and keep doing it well thank you debbie healthcare spending five mr james being such a good proponent for a particular point of view and i would say that i'm probably one hundred eighty degrees  looks at it in more of a universal way long term and ultimately at the national level i am a strong supporter of a single payer system bernese medicare for all and i think we should do as much as we can in vermont to to move towards that and the good thing about the a c s is that they they move this from a fee for service system into a payment per year per person and in a regional area and they encourage doctors to physicians health care providers of all kinds to work together to provide coordinated care and keep the people in their region healthy and not spend th necessarily on things that you know that are not needed so i think that they are going to lead to greater savings i am also proud on the health and welfare committee that i serve on and the center line serves on percent approximately of the general health care spending is spent on primary care there is there is greater long term savings and people are healthier you have much better outcomes right now in vermont we only spend about six percent six to seven per cent of our total spending on primer care said the more we move towards towards that preventive care the healthier population will be and the lower costs will be ok great joshua health care spending yes i would absolutely agree with the idea that primary care and preventive should be the the objective i agree with that i would differ a little bit in how we get to a larger health care system like a universal care a medicare for all if you  will i think it's christine how quest has sort of an interesting idea if i'm attributing it correctly to partner with other other states and i reason i like that a great deal if you look in what canada did in building up their their system it came from the provinces first and as i said earlier vermont is a small state and we're one of the oldest states and we've got about a low birth rate and so so long as we do have a a private insurance market that exists and those are the economic incentive s the size of our pool will be very determinant of of of what we can do and i i like the approach of so called romney care in massachusetts and i'd like to see something about getting vermont in on romney care if you will and that would increase the size of the pool and that would allow us more flexibility and then perhaps new hampshire wants onboard perhaps maine gets on board and we build up at a regional level and i don't know how that would how that would work how long that would take but the idea is to increase the the pool in the interim focus on preventive and primary care ok thank you we're going to switch to a couple questions that came in in advance of our form now that marijuana is legal do you support taxing taxing and regulating it and we are going to start with paul yeah i think it now that it's legal for monitors to use marijuana it doesn't make sense to create to maintain a system where it's illegal to buy it from a source where quantity of the quality in the safety of the product is completely unknown unfortunately you know it kind of leads us back to the early days of alcohol prohibition when people were you know getting sick off  gin and i've talked to a number of folks who have had experiences with people in their families who have you know gotten had some very adverse effects because marijuana that they were using  was not just marijuana so i think that to me the big issue about moving toward towards legalization model needs to be to eliminate the black market everything that was wrong with alcohol prohibition is still mostly maintained in in the current status for marijuana you have the only place to obtain it is through illegal means or a very small percentage of people can can grow it themselves or comfortable that's why i think we need to move to a model where it's available commercially and like every other product that we are from the market there are some very basic safety tests so that consumers are protected you know i in the house i voted against a huge you know big government bill that required a three thousand dollars permit to be able to grow marijuana that's insane all we're doing is protecting large companies and my big concern with a model that looks like that is going to have big tobacco come in and they're going to do the same thing with marijuana that's not going to help  that vermonters who are already engaged in other activities here can make it easy for them to add that to their current model services rather than larger companies coming in from out of state so the it makes sense that to make it commercially available and i think it makes sense to ply the seam tax that we might have either on a regular sales tax or be willing to look at you know what the way that we tax cigarettes on a on a measurement rather than a price measurement is who knows what's going to happen in the prices big concern i have about like the reason study is we have no idea what prices are going to do once it becomes commercially available specially with what's going on in other states so i think you're treating it a lot like like alcohol or tobacco or other controlled substances seems to make sense given where we are today ok we're talking about taxing and regulating marijuana i too agree that we should have a regulated industry i voted in favor of the senate bill that would regulate from seed to sa regulate it and to make sure the quality is there that it's not laced with other substances and you know frankly it doesn't make any sense not to get the revenue from from bad and i think it's important what we spend the revenue on i do have  concern about our young people and i know that you know sometimes young people can feel that if something's illegal then maybe they won't try a bit as soon as it's legal well then maybe it's a little more attractive to them so i think we need to make sure that we spend some of the revenue on education and prevention programs i think we also need to come up with some kind of fields sobriety test for for marijuana but i do think it makes a lot of sense for us to to regulate it and to move ahead with that ok marijuana taxing and regulating joshua i would first like to say that teenagers do not seem to be deterred by its  legality in any other so i'm also in favor of a tax and regulate structure for all the reasons previously stated safety one thing i would want to be very clear to note is i don't want this to be sort of a fun source for anything outside of as you said prevention education about drug abuse i don't if you'll pardon the pun i don't want to say to get addicted to this is revenue for something else because then we have this perverse incentive structure where we need more people smoking would be against that but taxing and regulating it and that's the next step yes totally ok jenny thank you so we did pass the seed to sale bill a couple of years ago in the senate and it was then  rejected by the house so we ended up with the current system of deregulating or making legal a lower levels of marijuana possession so the issue is how much money does a raise and i know the tax department has said that it doesn't raise sufficient funds to do everything that we would like it to do so would only pay for the administration of the program so we want to know that up front we didn't have that information when we previously passed the bill the other issue is and i agree one hundred percent that prevention programs need to be in place and i believe they should be in place before the tax and regulate system goes into place so there's a lag time and we need to get the money from somewhere perhaps it's the tobacco settlement funds that we've recently gotten there should be some more of that coming in but i agree with those who say that we have to be careful we fund for that would come in from the taxation system for marijuana needs to be protected so that it goes for prevention and it goes for those the the  agency to oversee the growth of the marijuana to make sure it's not contaminated needs to be sure that it's labeled accurately and that access is is prevented for under age folks age of twenty one seems appropriate but even though the literature says age of twenty five is better for the use it's really unfortunate that this drug which is now i'm a disenroll drug and carefully managed by our our our medical our medical dispensary says this drug is seen as a schedule one drug at the federal level so it's seen as having absolutely no value and yet we know that there's value for medicinal purposes and we're seeing that people are using it and can use it without running into either health or legal problems once they're older and use it moderately i am concerned i did talk with someone the other day who was raised the issue that if we start a tax and regulation program where are going to see the bigger businesses targeting people who are open to addiction the same way that the ads for alcohol might target someone open to addiction so we need to do this carefully but i think we did a good job with the bill a couple of years ago in the senate and i'd like to see that bill come back and reevaluated great thank you we have another question that came out from the audience the trump administration as part of its efforts to dismantle the affordable care act aca is now allowing small employers to lead the small group marketplace through their associations there is broad agreement this will lead to higher costs for those who are left in the digital slash small group insurance poll some people believe this will put the stability of our health insurance marketplace at risk do you share these concerns will you work health care as a public good that everybody is going to need at some point in in their lives then if we all pay into it it will make the the payment structure more equitable overall and it will keep costs down yes i will do everything i possibly can to to ensure that that we continue to view health care as a public good that every person deserves and that everybody needs to pay into because they're going to use it even when they're younger and healthier at some point in their lives they're going to need it and use it and just as we require social security and medicare even younger people have to pay into it because they're going to use it on down the line that's the way we need to think of our health care plans as well ok so we're talking about health care spending through exchange versus association joshua i would actually second what senator graham said about the idea of people being able to leave the pool i mean that was my point earlier on if we have a smaller pool that leads to greater  that the department of financial regulation brought to us asking us to allow for these small association plans the question that we had at that point i was very concerned about these plans becoming outside of our ability to regulate and oversee so we were reassured that we can we can keep keep people together the benefit is many small businesses that are might have a difficult time helping their employees now have a way to provide health care so one of the things that i would like to look at going forward is  will will these plans also be able to access exchange plans will these plans provide for co pays and deductibles that are not exorbitant so there are a lot of questions this is a new this is a new wrinkle i think we're all concerned that it will lead to a dissembling of the affordable care act which it shouldn't since the state can regulate and can oversee but i do share the concerns of senator ingram and mention it and initially will be we will be working on this and we are we will be listening to our small businesses i know that the fremont that vermont businesses are very supportive but they may or may not be supportive if all of a sudden people are going without or having to pay high co pays and high deductibles ok we're talking about health care spending through exchange versus associations paul i think i couldn't disagree more with my other three colleagues here there is no place that a one size fits all model is more inappropriate than health care i mean the way that we interact with our physician and what needs to happen in that arrangement it's totally contrary to the thing the government does well is do one thing the same for everybody you build a road or by use the road they need the same kind of road with health care it's completely the opposite everybody needs something different you know just was speaking with somebody earlier today is that twenty percent a hospital budget is processing insurance claims right and the problem is that providers roja hospital or  physician your your hands are tied because you have to take that kind of insurance because iraq has gone from having a place where we had ten or fifteen insurance companies to to and really it's most that one about eighty percent of state or something like that uses blue cross blue shield so providers has have lost their ability to truly be independent i think we need to get to a place where we have more choices for people you know i think it's important not to think of these association plan some foreign new thing gold thing that we don't really know anything about we had this in from on a couple years ago the chamber of commerce used to provide health insurance plans or body that's the kind of thing that's talked that is an example of an association plan we used to have it took it away took that choice away in it also really hurt a lot of our chambers of commerce around the state a lot of them use that revenue from those those premiums to fund their fund the chambers and provide economic development and also just want to touch on a couple things as rebuttal from the last round you know poor folks talking about the c e o again this is kind of a recycled model of the h m o's another failed policy from from the ninety's and when we talk about medicare for all we don't have medicare i have medicare i'm paying for medicare right now and i want to use it for thirty years and even the people like my clients who are on medicare they're using it a lot of them need a medicare supplement to make sure that they get their or their coverage that they need so the only reason medicare works is because we're taking people taking money from people like me for thirty years taking that premium and never providing benefits if an insurance company tried to do that in state of vermont take premium from somebody and deny every cl for thirty years we take them out so the idea that medicare for all is going to be a simple easy solution and everybody's going to get everything they want the numbers just don't just don't work for it can i just say one thing about medicare you're paying in for the future that's what medicare is so if we had better care from the time you're born then we'd be paying again and be utilizing it the problem with that cost well i'm to say do we want to do that you can answer that for yourself but i do believe that medicare is a stream leave valuable program the problem is we haven't funded it sufficiently over time and we should be increasing the funding for that rather than every year the social security goes up minimally or not at all and medicare goes up even more i know is predicted to go up another couple hundred dollars next year one hundred something next year so yes and people do need supplements why do they need supplements because it's not sufficient and we need to make sure that it is sufficient that's a federal level issue on the association if the feds can't dueled makes you think that the state of alert has expanded to if they were right now we have a road block in washington d c and we should be having a conversation rather than an argument so it's if you can talk about how can we get to where we need to be with health care i would say i ask our congressional smaller plans doesn't that introduce more instability in pricing isn't that precisely the point we want we want larger pools to have stability in the pricing for everybody to be able to contain costs better it doesn't seem to make sense to me to make smaller and smaller fragmented pools unless i'm misunderstanding you well what happens is if you have one big pool and there's a problem with that pool everyone suffers i mean that's one of the problems that we have with our medicaid system is we have one big pool  when there's cost you know utilization costs are high it gets moved around in the only thing that the state is able to do is keep rates low that's why providers are getting paid about forty two cents on the dollar if we didn't have the private insurance market that we have a lot of physicians won't be able to make it they certainly can't maintain their practice on medicaid rates and even on medicare rates it's a tough cost the need the insurance companies there that are paying those higher rates to keep them sustainable the problem is that these physicians have a huge chunk of what they need to charge is going to process in the claims because if they don't take blue cross they have no patients few years ago when we had places like golden rule lot of people o have they spend less money and they have better outcomes i look at health care in the same way that i look at our fire departments our police departments our libraries our roads there's certain things that really don't fit the capitalist model of having lots of choices and letting consumers and the free market decide things there there are certain things like and i would have put health care in that same category with the fire department the police department where we're better off when we pool our resources and create a more equitable system we spend there's so much money already in the system in vermont along we spend four billion dollars a year on our on our health care it's a matter of moving from premiums that are set by you know commercial companies that are very greatly depending on a lot of different factors to having a system in which we can make make it more equitable and we can actually reduce the costs and provide better care we've been on that track for over ten years and cost keep going up so we haven't don't we haven't gotten to the point that we're trying to get where we still have  have a comment if i could you know we're starting to move on to a conversation about all payer and how we pay per patient per month and that system and right now is in the state of vermont is in its second year of and we're looking at how will all payer work if you pay a physician or a practitioner for each patient per month then the patient that access has a lot of  care gets a lot of that money is used up and the patients who don't get a lot of care that money maybe left over at the end of the year there's a balance more profitable not to treat i'm saying it may be more profitable not to treat people but that doesn't mean that quality goes down and that is where oversight is so critical that's what our agency of human services and the university of vermont medical centers doing right now they're working together to decide is this a good way to care answered and we're almost out of time believe it or not so i want to ask you all what your opinion is on on the explain the asterisk legislation campaign do you think college students that are dismissed for sexual misconduct should be able to transfer  to schools with no notation on their transcript as to why they were dismissed and looks like joshua you can start us off i think with respect to the should be some notation if there was again not just know the person who was interested in this legislation actually contacted me and i said as long as some incident that's been demonstrated be true yes absolutely ok paul i guess  i'm not as familiar with this issue but i'm just wondering if there is a case of sexual assault it seems like that's that's a crime those people should be in the criminal justice system but if for some reason they're not i think as long as there is due process and there is actual findings of guilt any conduct whether it's sexual misconduct whether it's physical violence anything that a student does that makes them a danger to other students ought to be mentioned when that the one that university is accepting that student feels like that's you know that should be information at the university has at their disposal to decide whether they want to accept that suit again sensitive because what's been going on in the country of making sure that survivors of any kind of sexual harassment or are solved are taken seriously and that the perpetrators of these kinds of things are held accountable but you know in setting up a system like that we need to be careful also that we don't you know label people who may not have in fact the thing i mean that things need to be verified  d they do need to be explained and we also you know i very strongly believe in giving people second chances and if if people can learn from their mistakes and they are their misconduct and can make changes then  tonight from folks one of the things that i value about the senate is that we do tend to work together we work in committees and we listen to one another and we listen to others consistently our our perspective changes a bit when we look at some of the information that comes to us and that's a good thing and one of the things that i enjoy doing is staying in touch with my constituents i hear from constituents summer winter fall and spring and i thank you all for that i appreciate the comments and i appreciate the information that i received from you it is an unusual for a constituent to send me an idea that becomes a really important bill for example you know this year will be working i hope that we'll be working on an equal inclusive equal rights amendment very concerned about some of the issues that are going on in our state with respect to our minority populations i am also very concerned about what's happening at the federal level so i look forward to representing everyone in the senate and thank you very much idea that my two focus is really are helping to increase the boost the economy creating a focus on entrepreneurs and helping sole proprietors get from the zero to  one employee helping them bridge that gap and then the second thing we unfortunately didn't get to talk about is opioid crisis and meeting that head on and addressing not in a way that that's understanding that we have to help folks and the focus that we put on that issue is going to yield us results in other places as well so if you're if you're looking as many people are to keep young people here in vermont if you want to keep businesses here in vermont then then i hope you'll vote for me paul dame who's a young president of my own professionals and a business owner my experience in living in burlington living in the outside burlington area helps to to montpelier if i get the chance to go back my top priorities will be again passing legislation to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour over a gradual period of time  help our vermont workers and also passing paid family leave which i also think will help vermonters we have too many vermont families who where both both adults are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet and to me that is that is just wrong and we need to do something about it so there's a be my top priorities i've also spent a lot of time working on systemic racism and was the  and i also would like to introduce an amendment to the constitution to remove all reference to slavery in the constitution and as an airline said work with my colleagues to do a lot of other things to improve the lives of our monitors and that's best the reason that i run and that's the reason that i'd like to to return again thank you joshua closing statements yes good night everybody it was nice to talk with i am like paul that we didn't get to a lot of particular things my particular agenda you'll see it if you go to my facebook pages it's no wasted vote to talk about how we can make every vote count and that ties into things like systemic racism again unfortunately we didn't have time to get into the depth and complexity of that issue it really means a lot to me and we also didn't get to talk about education as as a teacher that would have been a very welcome conversation likewise some of the ethics planning commission issues of planning and how they relate to affordable housing but again those are all on the the web page and i look forward to your vote on november sixth thank you great thank you and thank you all so much for coming out tonight really appreciate it thank you we want to let everybody know of course they can vote now early at town city hall which i used to always forget to say but that's really important i know or to vote on election day which is tuesday november sixth and of course stay tuned to channel seventeen for our more continuing election coverage