After two years of preparing to tackle health care reform, the Shumlin administration is losing its most important player, Anya Rader Wallack, the chair of Green Mountain Care Board. Her departure will change the effort, but won't derail it.

One of the country's top medical journals is touting Vermont's health care reform effort as an example for the rest of the nation. A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine says other states can learn some lessons from Vermont in rolling out health exchanges that are essential to the federal Affordable Care Act.

Vermont became the first state on Monday to publish the rates it would charge people who don't currently have health insurance to get coverage - a key step toward establishing the health exchanges that are central to the federal health care law known as Obamacare. Health officials said Monday the rates are comparable to current commercial rates.

On Wednesday, the woman who has led the Shumlin administration's health care overhaul for the past two years announced that she's leaving state government at a critical juncture for the effort.

Newly elected Adjutant General Steven Cray discusses issues affecting the National Guard, VPR's Hamilton Davis analyzes Vermont's efforts to establish a health care exchange and we listen back to the voices in the news.

According to a new report, private health insurance premiums are increasing, on average, by roughly 7 percent this year and state officials say it's unlikely that this rate will go down unless comprehensive payment reform plans are put into place.

The Green Mountain Care Board has now completed its approval process for the coming year's budgets for Vermont's 14 hospitals. It was the board's first effort and marked the third iteration in the state's effort to regulate health care costs. The first was the Hospital Data Council that ran through the 1980s and early 1990s; that morphed into BISHCA, which first got the power to set budgets in the mid-1990s; and now the Green Mountain Care Board, which has the same powers as BISHCA, but should have far greater weight than its predecessor.

These were some of the voices in the news this week.

The Green Mountain Care Board has capped overall hospital spending for next year at 3.75 percent. But the decision does allow for higher spending if the money is targeted at specific cost saving investments.

Vermont's doctors have formed a new organization to allow them to take an active role in forming a new state health care system in the coming years. The new organization is needed to comply with federal anti-trust laws.

The new state board that will oversee virtually every aspect of health care in Vermont met for the first time on Tuesday. One of the top priorities for the Green Mountain Care Board is to implement a number of cost containment measures during its first year in operation.