News

The Green Mountain Care Board is reviewing proposed health insurance premium price increases for individual and small employer plans including Vermont Health Connect plans. (Small employers have less than 100 employees.) These plans cover nearly 80,000 Vermonters.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont is asking to increase premium prices by 7.5%, on average, for 2019. MVP Health Care is asking to increase premium prices by 10.9% on average. The price increases vary by plan.

Vermonters who get subsidies to help with premium prices may pay more or less in 2019 than in 2018. Changes to subsidized Vermonters’ premium prices are mostly based on changes in income, family size and which plan they choose during the next open enrollment. If you have questions about premium prices, contact the Office of the Health Care Advocate.

The Green Mountain Care Board will decide whether to change the premium prices for 2019. You can tell the board what you think they should do. Visit our How the Public Can Participate page for details on the public hearings and how to submit public comments to the board online, by mail or by phone. Your comments will be part of the public record. 

The Green Mountain Care Board must consider public comments when setting the 2019 premium prices. The public comment period ends July 25, 2018.

If you have questions about your health insurance, health care or about how you can give a public comment, contact the Office of the Health Care Advocate.

Renters at Risk: The Cost of Substandard Housing

Despite regulations intended to protect them from substandard housing conditions, many Vermont tenants still live in unsafe and unhealthy homes. Today, Vermont Legal Aid released a report, Renters at Risk: The Cost of Substandard Housing, to examine the problem and call for policy solutions to address substandard housing.

The report was the result of data analysis and interviews with tenants, advocates, and public officials. Our key findings are as follows.

1. Tenants who suffer from the various impacts of unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions experience increased health care usage, mental health problems, disruption to school and work, and homelessness.

2. The most common problems tenants face are pests and plumbing problems.

3. Threat of eviction and lack of affordable housing options often prevent tenants from reporting rental housing health code violations.

4. Town health officers are commonly unpaid volunteers without the time or experience necessary to address health code violations.

5. We can and should make changes to our code enforcement system.

In our report, the voices of nine tenants in the struggle for healthy housing reveal the long-lasting impacts of substandard housing. It is clear that their experiences with inadequate housing conditions are not isolated instances – many other renters throughout Vermont suffer serious problems in their rented homes. For example, Amberly, a tenant in Rutland, had to live with a severe rat infestation (see attached photo). It appeared that they were coming into her home from the outside through the basement.  Amberly set traps and did what she could, but had to live with rats -- in her home, in her kitchen, chewing on her possessions – for months before she could move out. Amberly developed hives and other medical issues in addition to handling the plain stress of a rat infesation, all while trying to juggle work and raising two small children.

“This kind of situation is too common, and it is not just a problem for tenants,” according to Maryellen Griffin, one of the attorneys at Vermont Legal Aid who worked with lead author Tessa Horan on the report. “These problems also hurt good landlords, towns, and taxpayers. The medical costs, the downward pressure on property values, the risk that the rats will continue to multiply and migrate to other buildings, not to mention the human suffering – these are problems for all of us.  Allowing our housing stock to continue to degrade threatens the health of our residents as well as the tax base and the viability and vibrancy of our towns.”

We are proposing legislation to address this issue using three strategies:

1. Strengthen Town Health Officers’ authority to issue orders and enforce them, and make it unlawful to re-rent an apartment if the landlord has not complied with the orders.

2. Direct the Department of Health to provide more coordinated support to Town Health Officers.

3. Create a statewide database of rental housing to collect better data about the problem.

As Jonathan Bond from Vermont Tenants Inc. said in the report, “If we’re going to have a really basic health code, I would like to see the basic health code being enforced, and right now it’s just not being enforced.”

To read our full report and list of recommendations to address the impacts of substandard housing on Vermont tenants, visit our website at http://www.vtlegalaid.org/renters-at-risk.

When the Bedbugs Bite, Vermont Officials Are Ill-Equipped to Respond

As Chester's health officer, Leslie Thorsen is responsible for enforcing Vermont's rental housing code, meant to protect tenants from inadequate plumbing and heating, contaminated water, rodent infestations, and other health-threatening conditions.

Thorsen, an operating room nurse, does all this in her spare time, for just $1,000 a year. And when she responds to a tenant's complaint, there is little she can do if a landlord refuses to correct a problem.

"The [most] you can do is write a health order," Thorsen said, referring to a legal document that negligent landlords have been known to ignore.

Enforcement of Vermont's rental housing codes depends almost entirely on people such as Thorsen — low-paid or volunteer town health officers with minimal training and a limited ability to remedy substandard housing.

In a report set to be released this week, Vermont Legal Aid concludes that this system fails to protect tenants, essentially trapping them in unsafe homes. The report tells the stories of Vermont renters living with broken furnaces, sparking electrical outlets, cough-inducing mold and leaking toilets.

"I think it's fair to say that the governmental response has been inadequate," said Jack McCullough, a longtime attorney with the nonprofit law office.

Legal Aid's report calls for creating a landlord registry to allow more oversight of rental units, professionalizing the health officer force and increasing penalties for violating the rental housing health code.

Enforcing minimum housing standards is particularly important because of Vermont's aging housing stock — 43 percent of rentals were built before 1950, according to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency — and a dearth of affordable housing statewide, said Maryellen Griffin, a lawyer with Legal Aid.

Under the state's rental housing health code, landlords are legally required to provide necessities such as a sink, a flush toilet, a working sewage system, a source of heat, and a structure that is weather-tight and rodent-free. (Fire safety regulations are separately enforced by the state Department of Public Safety.)

Vermont law "would seem to put tenants in a good position to have reliable and well-maintained housing," McCullough said. "The problem is that actually getting those rights enforced has been tremendously difficult." [...]

Some health officers limit what they'll endure in service to their towns. Edgerly said he's declined to inspect a tenant's complaint about bedbugs: "I'm not going into a bedbug situation — no way."

That sort of attitude frustrates tenants.

"Our clients will make complaints to town health officers and it doesn't really go anywhere," Legal Aid lawyer Sandy Partiz said.

"We know that people are radically underreporting problems because they don't believe in the system," Griffin said. [...]

Legal Aid, which plans to advocate for some of these changes during the legislative session, says steps such as investing in a better-paid, more professional force of town health officers will save the state money in the long run. "Something that might have cost a landlord a few hundred dollars to fix, like a mold problem, can end up costing thousands of dollars in health care expenses to treat a tenant's resulting respiratory illness," the report says. [...]

Patients who are Deaf or hard of hearing will receive better services at the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMMC) because of settlements reached with Vermont Legal Aid, the Vermont Human Rights Commission, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The agreements settle multiple cases brought by Vermont Legal Aid at the Vermont Human Rights Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice for UVMMC’s failure to provide adequate Deaf interpretation services to patients and family members at the hospital.

The cases were brought by Vermont Legal Aid because UVMMC had not provided adequate sign language interpretation services in multiple cases over the past four years. “Credit goes to our clients for demanding their rights to equal access in order to make positive change for all Deaf patients,” said Barbara Prine, Staff Attorney with the Disability Law Project of Vermont Legal Aid. “We also thank UVMMC for agreeing to robust improvements in its system for Deaf access.

Under the global settlement agreements, UVMMC must improve policies on Deaf access, train staff on how to provide accommodations, and set standards for working with in-person and remote interpretation. The agreement also includes grievance procedures. The Vermont Human Rights Commission will monitor compliance with the settlement agreement over the next two and a half years.

“This comprehensive agreement covers best practices for serving individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing in hospital settings and also provides for an extended period of monitoring to ensure that these much needed changes are effectuated,” said Karen Richards, Executive Director of the Human Rights Commission.  “The HRC appreciates the UVMMC’s cooperation in reaching a settlement that will improve services to their Deaf and hard of hearing patients and family members.”

 “We strive to provide all of our patients with the highest quality of care, but unfortunately we did not meet that goal in these cases,” said Eileen Whalen, RN, MHA, president and chief operating officer of the University of Vermont Medical Center.  “We have taken many steps to strengthen our interpreter services including hiring an Interpreter Services Coordinator, educating staff on the resources we have and how to use them, and upgrading our remote interpretation technology.   We’ll continue to seek out opportunities to strengthen our services and policies regarding the treatment of Deaf patients, and maintain the involvement of our patient and family advisors who have provided valuable guidance in this area.”

“I’m glad that Deaf patients stood up together for our rights. I’m also glad that the hospital has agreed to improve its policies and procedures so that the Deaf community will have equal access to medical treatment,” said George Lareau, one of the complainants.