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.