Green Mountain Care Board urges one consolidated report, requests staff and contractor funding tied to S.126

Susan Barrett, executive director of the Green Mountain Care Board, told the House Committee on Health Care on April 15 that sections of S.126 create overlapping reporting deadlines and suggested consolidating them to make the information more useful to lawmakers. "The annual report every year is released on January 15, so this report would come out on 01/15/2026," Barrett said, noting section 16 would produce a January report while section 14 would require a separate February 15, 2026, update.

Barrett said the board prefers using the February 15 date for an initial implementation report and then adding an annual reference-based pricing update to the board's January annual report starting in 2027. "We could take the G in section 16 and just have that begin on January," she said in discussion with committee members and counsel. The proposal would avoid duplicative reporting in the first year while establishing an ongoing annual entry point.

The board described staffing and contracting resources it says are necessary to support the statute's work if S.126 advances. Barrett said the governor's recommended budget already includes three general positions for the board — a financial analyst, a quality position and an access position — that are intended to support current board responsibilities but are not targeted to S.126 work. For S.126 specifically, the board said it is seeking three positions: a director of reference-based pricing, a project manager for reference-based pricing, and a procurement/operations position to handle contracting and administrative requirements. "The director will lead the work building the methodology for reference based pricing... the project manager will assist the director in all of those layers of work," Barrett said.

Jean Setter, administrative services director at the board, told the committee the board currently has 33 positions including five board members (28 staff) and an operating budget that Barrett characterized as roughly $10 million. Barrett said a substantial portion of the board's budget supports two databases the board stewards — the health care claims database and the hospital discharge database — and that the board also contributes $510,000 annually toward funding the Office of the Health Care Advocate via the Agency of Human Services contract process.

On contracts, board staff described two line items that have been moved into the fiscal budget: roughly $500,001 for a contractor to help set up reference-based pricing methodology and a $150,000 appropriation from the Health IT Fund to support standardization of electronic hospital budget data submissions. Barrett said the $150,000 would be used to hire a contractor to transform and normalize hospital-submitted budget data so the board can make more consistent, automated apples-to-apples comparisons across hospitals during budget review. "We would hire a contractor to work on our system so that that information would be more apples to apples," she said.

Michael Barber, general counsel for the Green Mountain Care Board, described section 11 of S.126, which would amend 18 V.S.A. § 9374 to make explicit the board's ability to share subpoenaed or produced records with other state entities. "We support this section," Barber said, and asked a minor expansion in draft language to allow sharing not only with state agencies but also with state officers (for example, the state auditor), provided the receiving party agrees to maintain confidentiality.

No formal vote was taken during the committee hearing. Committee members asked clarifying questions about staffing numbers, the scope of contractor work, and whether the reporting changes would create duplicative annual filings; board staff proposed technical drafting fixes and an initial one-month extension for the first-year implementation report followed by annual reporting in the board's January report thereafter.

Why this matters: The board regulates hospital budgets and stewards statewide health data. Lawmakers must balance timetables for receiving implementation information with the board's capacity to build methodologies, hire technical staff, and procure contractor support without duplicative reporting. The committee indicated willingness to coordinate draft language with legislative counsel to avoid redundancy.

Ending: The committee accepted the board's recommendation to coordinate with legislative counsel on drafting the reporting language and to consider the board's staffing and contracting requests as the budget process continues. Board staff said they will work with counsel and the committee on revised statutory language and timing.