Tens of Thousands of Small Business Owners Set to Hear from NFIB
Montpelier, VT., December 30,
2014 – Today, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) announced
its launch of a massive mail campaign encouraging small business owners in
Vermont to support the repeal of Act 48 – single-payer provisions. NFIB
spent years challenging the enactment of a single-payer healthcare system and
was pleasantly surprised earlier this month by Governor Shumlin’s contrite
admission that it was simply too costly to pursue. According to small
business, the next step in the battle to alleviate the uncertainty they are
carrying is to have Act 48 single-payer provisions repealed.
“Obviously the first priority of
the legislature is to figure out who our next Governor will be but once they
have decided between Mr. Milne and Mr. Shumlin, it is incumbent upon them to
repeal the provisions of Act 48 that put in motion the enactment of
single-payer,” said Shawn Shouldice who serves as the state director of
NFIB/VT. “NFIB is beginning a massive outreach effort that includes calling on
our members to contact their local representatives across Vermont to join us in
our fight against a law that we knew all along was doomed from its inception.”
The post card, to be mailed early
next week cites the more than $2 billion price tag of Governor Shumlin’s
single-payer plan. This enormous cost would have been fiscally impossible to
fund without a massive, across the board, tax hike on all Vermonters.
“Now that we have heard definitively
that single-payer implementation is fiscally unsustainable, we must go back to
the drawing board,” she continued. “The uncertainty this conversation has
caused had a negative impact on small business owners’ ability to create jobs
and invest in their businesses. We’ve always been confident in our stance
on single-payer, we’re glad the Governor caught up with us. And now after
years and infinite financial resources have been wasted, we are asking the
legislature to do the same.”
