St. Albans Messenger: Sanders Town Meeting in Richford, Vt.

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Sanders Town Meeting in Richford, Vt.

St. Albans Messenger

Written By Michelle Monroe

"Unless we begin to stand up at the grassroots level and demand … changes, we are not going to get them," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, told a crowd gathered at the Crossing Restaurant in Richford Saturday morning.

The conversation ranged from the specific to the philosophical as the discussion, including area residents, touched on economic issues from health care to the role of government in the economy.

Health care is a national economic issue, Sanders said, hindering investment by diverting business income to purchasing health insurance. General Motors, Sanders noted, pays more for health care for every car produced than it does for steel.

Mary Mankin of Richford, pointed out that taxpayers are paying for the health care of public employees and retirees. "Our tax dollars are already paying for some people's health insurance, just not everybody," Mankin said.

Those costs can be significant. In Montgomery, the town pays $18,000 of the $20,000 it costs to insure the town clerk, who makes $23,500 per year in salary, and roughly one-tenth of the $10 million Enosburg school budget goes to pay for health insurance for school employees.

By not taxing employer provided health insurance, taxpayers are subsidizing the health insurance provided by employers while the self-employed purchase health insurance with after-tax dollars. "It's unfair," Mankin said.

She also expressed concern that the Obama plan doesn't address the costs of administering private health insurance and may result in the sickest people being on a public insurance program, inflating the costs of that program.

Sanders agreed with Mankin's remarks, adding that $400 billion a year is spent on administration and profits for private insurance companies. Insurance companies, Sanders pointed out, are in the business of denying people care, because that is how they make money.

American must decide if they believe everybody should receive health care as a right of citizenship, Sanders said.

Another audience member raised the issue of prescription drug costs. "We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," Sanders said.

"The price of medicine is so high in this country because of the power of the pharmaceutical industry. They never, ever lose. Congress has never once successfully taken them on," Sanders said. The Medicare reform bill that added prescription drug coverage to Medicare services was just such a loss, according to Sanders.

In addition to creating a "donut hole" in coverage - Medicare recipients in the donut hole must pay the full cost for their medications — the bill also barred Medicare from negotiating lower prices for medications, something the Veteran's Administration already does.

Asked if a single-payer health care reform bill was realistic, Sanders replied, "The powers of … big money interests are probably too strong to get a single-payer system." The best that can be hoped for, he said, is a strong public option.

The Northern Tier Centers for Health (NOTCH), which operates the community health care center in Richford and satellite offices in several other Franklin County communities, is a model for how to provide affordable primary care, Sanders said.

The Richford center was the third such center started in the state, which now has 8 centers with 30 satellite offices. One hundred thousand Vermonters, or nearly one out of every six Vermonters, receives care from community health centers, Sanders said.

Sanders called NOTCH director Pam Parsons to the podium. Parsons discussed the programs expansion into St. Albans last year, a dental program with Missisquoi Valley Union (MVU) that is currently in development, and the use of stimulus funds to increase staff at the centers.

The MVU dental program is "what innovative dental care is all about" Sanders said. Once the program is up and running it will provide year round care to anyone in the community on a sliding scale, Sanders explained.

Oil and farming

Turning his attention to oil and gas prices, Sanders said, "I think the evidence is pretty clear that the reason prices are going up is because of speculation on Wall Street." Demand for oil is at 10-year low, while crude oil inventories are at the highest they've ever been, Sanders said. Weak demand and plenty of supply should result in falling prices, but prices have risen 70 percent in the last year, Sanders said.

Swanton farmer Dick Longway asked about the dairy industry, pointing out that while dairy farmers are facing record losses companies like Dean Foods and Kraft are making record profits.

"You've got these people calling the tune, and farmers have to dance to their tune," Sanders said, referring to increased concentration in the dairy industry.

With the new administration there is more likely to be an anti-trust investigation into concentration in the dairy industry, Sanders said. Currently, Dean Foods controls roughly half of processed milk sales in the United States.

The Vermont Legislature recently passed a bill requiring the state attorney general to initiate an anti-trust investigation into the dairy industry.

The economy

"If anybody thinks that all of our problems just began a year ago … and if we could just go back to the way we were a year, a year and a half ago, we'd be fine; if you think that, you're good, dead wrong," Sanders said in discussing the economy.

Declining incomes for working Americans and a loss of the country's manufacturing base are problems going back 20 to 30 years, according to Sanders. "We were a country that produced real products and paid people real wages," Sanders said, adding, "You don't need to be a Ph.D. in economics to understand that you're not going to have a strong economy… if what we consume is made abroad."

In the eight years of the Bush presidency annual median household income in the United States fell $2,000 and 6 million more people slipped into poverty, Sanders said.

While middle income families lost money, the richest gained in income with the richest one percent of Americans - a common Sanders refrain -- now earning as much income as the bottom 50 percent and controlling as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, Sanders said.

Sanders, unsurprisingly, did not pull his punches when discussing the financial crisis, describing the behavior of the men and women running the big financial firms as reckless, then adding, "They're very religious people, but their religion is greed."

The mortgage industry pushed sub-prime loans onto unsuspecting borrowers who couldn't afford them, Sanders said. "What they were doing was fraudulent and in many ways illegal," Sanders said.

In January, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that the FBI, too, believed there was widespread fraud in the mortgage industry as early as 2002 and had asked the White House for more resources to investigate but was denied those resources.

The sub-prime mortgages were then combined with good mortgages and sold in securities, Sanders explained.

When former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, a former CEO of the troubled financial firm Goldman-Sachs, came to Congress and said he'd been wrong about the soundness of the economy and needed money immediately to bailout the largest banks or the world economy would fail, Sanders said he asked, "Why don't you ask your friends to pay for the bailout?"

"It didn't make a lot of sense to me that the middle class and working families in this country had to bail out Wall Street," Sanders, who voted against the bailout, said.

Sanders also pointed out that the official unemployment statistics underestimate unemployment by not counting the underemployed, those who are working part-time but seeking full-time jobs, and discouraged workers who have stopped looking for work. When those groups are included the unemployment rate is 13-14 percent, not 8.9 percent, Sanders said.

Calling President Barack Obama "very, very smart" and "thoughtful," Sanders said that what he likes best about Obama is his willingness "to treat us like we're adults… and not sweep issues under the rug."

"Our health care system is failing… and Obama has thrown that out there," Sanders said.

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