Peter Shumlin, the former governor of Vermont who tried unsuccessfully to create the nation’s first single-payer health care system, is sharing lessons he learned in office with students and faculty members at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
An October 27, 2019 Vermont Digger article profiled Shumlin, who is currently aMenschel Senior Leadership Fellowat Harvard Chan School. The article followed Shumlin into the classroom, where he is teaching a course called “Health Policy and Leadership: Reforming America’s Broken Health Care System from Within,” and examined his efforts to launch a single-payer system in Vermont.
Shumlin discussed the economic challenges that such health systems pose and said his inability to deliver health care reform was “the biggest failure of my political leadership.”
Shumlin, however, isn’t only focusing on his single-payer experience in the classroom. He’s also drawing lessons from passing a first-in-the-nation law to label genetically modified organisms in food, as well as from climate change policy.
“The policies that we make about what food we eat, about whether or not you can have access to insurance as a right and not a privilege, about whether we get off coal and oil and move to renewables, all those issues are going to come right to the door of health care providers,” Shumlin said.
Read the Vermont Digger article: Peter Shumlin turns hard-knock lessons into Harvard course