Dan - West Pawlet, VT

“We currently have health care through Vermont Health Connects, and because we’re low-income dairy farmers, we qualify for Vermont Medicaid. If we had universal healthcare, it would impact our farmer business because we wouldn’t have to make business decisions based on whether added income would make us lose our Vermont Medicaid or not, and we could just know that we had health care provided. I would say that because I’ve qualified for Vermont Medicaid and I was able to have two rotator cuff surgeries, one on each shoulder, I am a better working part of the Vermont community, and if I hadn’t had Vermont Medicaid, I wouldn’t have been able to afford that kind of surgery that keeps me farming like I do. The biggest barrier is that we have to be conscious of the narrow window that we are able to qualify for Vermont Medicaid and that’s a big issue for us whether for making business decisions because losing our healthcare would be too expensive to allow us to do other things that we could do if we didn’t have to worry about that. We wish that it was available for everyone, and that it wasn’t so based on your income. I really like the idea of Medicaid for All - that no one had to qualify for it, and there was no insurance company red-tape that made it difficult for anybody to get healthcare, and high deductibles that make it impossible to have health insurance other than disaster insurance where if you get so sick that you can’t afford anything, that then your healthcare would kick in. I think it would be a huge saving for anyone if there wasn’t all that bureaucracy that holds people back”.