Committee reviews draft statewide health care delivery plan: scope, data sources and timeline to 2029

A legislative committee reviewed draft Section 8, which would create a statutory statewide health care delivery plan to be led by the Agency of Human Services in collaboration with the Green Mountain Care Board, the Department of Financial Regulation, the Vermont Program for Quality and Health Care, the Office of Health Care Advocate, and a Health Care Delivery Advisory Committee to be established by the draft.

The draft describes a broad scope for the plan: aligning with stated principles for health care reform, promoting access to high-quality, cost-effective primary, chronic, long-term and hospital-based community services across Vermont, and striving to make mental health, substance use disorder treatment, emergency medical services and nonmedical supports available regionally. The plan would provide annual targets for total cost of care across Vermont’s health care system and set reasonable annual cost growth rates. The draft also specifies that hospital total cost-of-care targets would exclude revenue derived from a hospital’s investments in primary care, mental health care, and substance use disorder treatment services.

The draft requires using existing analyses and plans — including Act 167 transformation planning, the expenditure analysis and health care spending estimate developed under current statute, the state health improvement plan, the Green Mountain Care Board’s health resource allocation plan, hospitals’ community health needs assessments, and the Statewide Quality Assurance Program maintained by the Vermont Program for Quality and Health Care — and any additional data the agencies deem appropriate. The plan must identify gaps in care, potential circumstances in which closures or consolidations could improve quality, access and affordability, opportunities to reduce administrative burden, and federal, state or other barriers to the plan’s goals with proposed mitigation where feasible.

The draft sets a multi-year stakeholder engagement and data collection window from 2025 through 2027, requires the agency to prepare the plan in 2028, and to present it on or before Jan. 15, 2029 to this committee and to the Senate Health and Welfare Committee. Thereafter, the agency would prepare an updated plan every three years and present it to the General Assembly on or before January 15 every third year after 2029. Committee members said they would revisit specific amendments to the plan at a subsequent meeting.

The transcript records substantial detail on scope and timing but shows the committee planned to continue detailed drafting in future sessions rather than finalize the plan text at this meeting.