Green Mountain Care Board seeks extra staff for AHEAD transition and outlines impacts of proposed CON threshold changes

Tara Foster, chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, told the Senate Health and Welfare Committee at a committee meeting that the board supports the governor’s recommended budget and is requesting additional staff if Vermont moves forward with the AHEAD model, and that proposed changes to certificate-of-need (CON) thresholds would shift fee burdens to hospitals and insurers.

The board’s Administrative Services Director, Jean Stetter, said the board’s mission is “to drive system wide improvements in access, affordability, and quality of healthcare to improve the health of Vermonters.” Stetter described the board’s budget composition, recent increases tied to new drug-pricing work under Act 134 and staffing requests linked to the possible federal AHEAD demonstration.

The nut graf: The board told legislators it needs more people and more billing flexibility to handle a likely gap year between OneCare Vermont winding down and any new AHEAD implementation; at the same time, the committee is considering H.96, a CON-reform bill that would raise jurisdictional thresholds and exempt some state-funded projects, changes the board says will modestly reduce its application fee revenue and shift costs to hospitals and private insurers.

Stetter outlined the budget math: excluding prescription-drug staffing and governor-requested positions, the board’s base budget is roughly 5% higher than the prior year. Funding for Act 134 work on drug pricing increased the board’s request by about 14.9% in that line. Stetter said the board received an allocation of $245,000 intended for two positions for prescription-drug work but that hiring a more senior data-and-analytics director increased costs above that estimate. The governor’s office made available roughly $750,000 the board could use to request three positions from the administration’s…