Copley hospital closes it's birthing center while a neighboring service provider was accused of mishandling state funds.

This comes as Vermonters feel the sticker shock of next year's health insurance rates.

Plus, as winter nears, Vermont gears up for another seasonal tourism wave.

But a changing climate, new immigration policies and a tight housing market are making things tough for local businesses.

All that and more ahead on Vermont this week.

From the Vermont public studio in Winooski, this is Vermont this week, made possible in part by the Lintilhac Foundation and Milne Travel.

Here's moderator Mitch Wertlieb.

Good evening everyone, I'm Mitch Wertlieb.

It's Friday, November 14th, and joining us on the panel today, we have Aaron Calvin from the store reporter Sasha Goldstein, editor at seven days.

And Olivia Geiger with Vtdigger.

Thank you all so much for being here today.

Really appreciate the time.

We're going to start right at the top with a story that is, affecting everyone.

As you know, right now is open enrollment for people who, got to get on health insurance plans.

And a lot of folks are taking a look at the cost of health insurance premiums.

And they are getting sticker shock.

Shock.

Olivia Geiger, what can you tell us about what folks are facing here?

Folks are facing really high hikes in premiums for health insurance plans that they're buying off the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

So Vermont Health Connect, this is jus people are seeing rates triple or double in some instances when it comes to buying health insurance.

This is something that nearly 27,000 Vermonters are facing.

It's this is the majority of people who buy their insurance off of the exchange.

It's really astronomical just for the families who buy their insurance this way as well as for the hospitals that are being paid by these insurers.

This is something that is really going to hit close to home and is going to continue now that the government shutdown that was about these subsidies has ended.

Yeah, it's ended.

But there was a fight about all of this and Democrats held out for, you know, over a month, the longest government shutdown in history.

But they didn't get what they wanted, did they, out of this.

And it still, there is no deal on how to bring down these health insurance premiums.

Right?

This whole thing was about these subsidies.

And yet here we are without these premiums, which really leaves people looking at open enrollment without any of these expanded subsidies.

So people are buying insurance plans without the support they're use to having from the government.

And we'll just see if they'll be able to get that before 2026.

Yeah, there's the state legislature going to have to take this up, too.

Sasha.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering.

I mean, affordability is kind of the governor.

Phil Scott's, big thing.

We saw the push last year for education reform, and, health care has got to be top of mind for lawmakers.

I'm sure they're hearing from constituents left and right because, you know, it's obviously Vermont Health Connect, but I think private, businesses are seeing this as well, small businesses.

So it's so it's across the board and there's this concern in the health insurance, world about this death spiral where people who are healthier, kind of give it up because it's not worth paying those extreme costs.

And what happens is that leave sicker people, and it costs more for the insurers who kind of throw up their hands and might abandon the market at that point.

So it's kind of scary times.

It does feel a bit like we're on the cliff right now, and the only thing that we know for sure is that the Democrats were able to get a promise of, well, we'll talk about it when this comes up.

But certainly the Republicans or control of all the branches at this point did not say anything about, well, we're going to do something about extending those ACA, Affordable Care Act subsidies.

So again, we're all kind of in this wait and see period.

But it's a very scary time.

I want to move on to a story now that both, Aaron Calvin and Olivia Geiger have reported on, Copley Center, we knew this was going to happen.

They have closed their birthing center.

Workers have been laid off.

Aaron Calvin, give us a remind us here why this was so important for the Royal County.

Yeah.

So, as Olivia pointed out in her reporting this week, Weld County is no a maternal health care desert, and, there will no longer be babies born in the Mobile County.

Unless in an emergency.

A situation which they are most And, you know, there were a lot of last ditch efforts to try to extend this or stop this, the Green Mountain Care Board, the office of the Health Care Advocate, people tried to, you know, sort of get them to reconsider.

The board of trustees reaffirmed their decision.

Their last meeting before the closure on Halloween.

On October 26th, the last baby was born at Copley Hospital in a non-emergency basis, to a couple from Hardwick who sort of stumbled into history and, you know, had nothing but great things to say about the midwives.

So some of their left shifts, they, Halloween, midwives and nurses dressed up as characters from The Handmaid's Tale to sort of, a not so subtle point, not so subtle.

Yeah.

And they had a party, in Morrisville the next day, sort of a funeral party.

There was a potluck.

It was, sad.

But, you know, a lot of people came together to try to prevent this, and, you know, didn't stop it, but, you know, these people are still going to be searching for answers.

Olivia Jaeger, you were writing about this and, really a poignant, story you told in your piece was about, a woman who had been at the birthing center the longest, and she the one who delivered the last baby at this birthing.

Yeah, yeah.

I think what you're referring to is I spoke with one of th midwives at Copley, Kip Bovie, who was describing kind of this.

They had this list as November 1st was approaching, and she and the other midwives were like, watching their patients and wondering who is going to be the last person to give birth in the birthing center before it closes.

And she describes, like watching and waiting and then being the one on call there when the last parent went into labor and, she, she was saying that it was everyone was like, it should be you, it should be you, it should be you.

And because she had been there as, as the sort of longest continuous midwife on staff and just a really touching story about the dedication that these providers had to this center and the service and the patients there.

And we should remind people, though, what what, the Copley folks were saying about closing this birth, closing the birthing center is low birth rates.

There haven't been as many babies born in the Royal County that was part of the issue.

And also, it's not much of a cash generator, is it?

Right?

Right.

Birthing is called something.

It's a phrase I learned is a loss leader, which is sort of universal for hospital to not make money on birthing.

But the theory is if you are born somewhere and you have a good you experience delivering your baby there, you will bring that baby back for its care.

And it is sort of a draw to a hospital.

So.

So Copley is not uniqu in losing revenue on birthing, but it really in the point that they were making in this decision to close the birthing center was that they were really not having a lot of babies there in the Model County.

And a lot of the Royal County babies that were being born were only about half of them were at Copley.

So it really was a volume argument, which, they sort of outlined in this.

They hired this consultant to, to help them figure things out as they were making the decision to close.

And they no one has seen that consultant's report yet, but they provided some of the information that came from them in this October 17th letter to the Green Mountain Care Board.

That is fascinating to dive into and sort of get a sense of what their thinking was around this.

But, well, where are people going to go now?

For the most part, you know, they have to drive, certain distances now to to which hospitals are going to pick up the slack.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So so the midwives actually did a lot of this inquiry to their patients.

And it sounds like a lot of patients will go to UMC, surprisingly high proportion.

It sounds like, given how much farther that is for a lot of people in the mile drive, right.

They expect about half to go to Burlington.

Maybe 40%.

But yeah, surprisingly large portion of them, many others will go to see VMC in, Washington County.

Others will look to other hospitals in the Northeast Kingdom.

But, yeah, I think the important point is that on average, with an average is means that there are people who are going to b driving much longer than this, that people will see a 20 minute increase in their drive time for not just this estimate.

Right.

that's not I mean, I think that if you live in Morrisville, you know that the neares hospital outside of Copley is, at least half an hour.

Let's say you have 20 minutes.

Seems a little, you know, if you're putting your pedal to the metal, maybe.

And you shouldn't be doing that.

Anyway, a lot of pushback on that that I heard.

Yeah, for sure.

One piece I, I would like to add to that too, that I think is really important to underscore is that it's not just birthing, that Copley is losing, it's prenatal care and postnatal care, which is really what I think worries.

A lot of the midwives that I spoke with is that when you think of that drive time, if it's even if it's 20 minutes or really more up to an hour for some people, and you think about how often you need to go for a prenatal visit, a lot of people are worried that there are going to be mothers who just can't take that kind of time out of their schedule to drive all the way to UVM or VMC, and are just going to forego a lot of this prenatal care.

Which means that if you have gestational diabetes or preeclampsia or any of these, these things that are prenatal visits are meant to to catch, and you wait too long to to see it.

It just makes things far too complicated and much more dangerous which I think is a big concern for definitely a lot scenario.

Well, I appreciate both your reporting on this and Aaron Kelvin, I want to stick in here in the Royal County because there's a lot going on.

I this small community, you wrote this fascinating story that dropped this week about the Male Health Partners Day or etc.

release certified health care center, apparently misusing some funds.

And this is tied to state oversight and, Copley Hospital helping to bail these folks out.

Give us a general parameter here.

What happened with, Memorial Health Partners?

Sure.

Well, I was on this program about a year ago reporting on how the moral health partners found themselves in this financial crisis, that they needed the state and county hospital to come in and sort of bail them out of Copley, gave them $150,000 to help with that.

The state gave them an initial amount of $400,000 this spring, with another 400 on the way.

If they could, you know, prove that they were going to be saving about $2 million.

And if they made some leadership changes, they've hired a new CEO, a new CFO.

But during that process, they discovered that this money that was intended to help integrate mental health services into primary care in the Royal County was mostly being used to cover their own expenses in other ways.

And the state, you know, heard from these providers first that this money was being misused and decided to make that change, to make Copley Hospital the administrator of this money.

And the Royal Health partners protested this.

It's unclear exactly why.

But in some public records that I uncovered from the Agency of Human Services, there's you know, this big push and pull, basically, of the state saying, hey, you misused all this money and the male health partners saying, we will pay it back to you in installments, which is what they're going to do now.

Now, there was also a pretty high profile resignation, due to all this.

Right.

Somebody left their post.

Yes.

Erica Scott, vice president of the, executive at the, the, Home Health Care Service.

And while county also happens to be Governor Scott's daughter, she sent a resignation letter and, additional follow up letters to, DeShawn Groves at the Department of Health access.

You know, basically saying that she was resigning because she wasn't being kept in the loop.

You know, potentially because, you know, people thought that because of her dad, because of her position elsewhere, that she was not, you know, totally on board with the health partners way of seeing things.

And I think more than anything that just demonstrates that even though we have these looming Medicaid cuts, that everyone is trying to collaborate and save money and get ready for, we are still seeing some tension, especially in these rural areas where, different health care providers sort of cover the same territory, in the same turf, that there are these lingering, tensions between the people who operate these, these facilities, that is not going to be resolved overnight.

It sounds like a trust issue, Erin.

Is that fair to say, you know, that that between the state company and the moral health partners is not a lot of trust going on, right?

There's a lot of suspicion and a lot of concern.

And, you know, Groves told me, last week that, you know, they just want to preserve health care access in the Royal County.

And I think that's what the state aims to do.

And when you say Groves, I'm sorry.

DeShawn Groves, the commissioner of, Department of Health access.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, and so where do things stand now?

Briefly with the moral health partners.

Are they still insolvent or are they still having these finished.

They're they've got they have a new CEO in that everyone seems excited about.

And they are expecting this second tranche of money from the state to give them a total of $800,000 for the year.

And it sounds like they've executed these cost savings by closing their office and Stowe, having Copley purchase one of their buildings and consolidating their, so, you know, there's been a sort of transactional nature to all of this, but everyone seems optimistic that they're on the right path.

Okay.

Well, thank you for your reporting on that.

I want to move on to, the season that we're in now.

We're sort of in that in between time, foliage season is over.

We're, approaching winter.

There are some labor and housing challenges specifically for the hospitality industry.

And again, Erin, I want to stick with you on this one briefly.

This is certainly hitting areas like snow right?

Yeah.

You know, it didn't for much of a damper on the foliage season, but, you know, the early snow was interesting because we got a lot of snow last week in the valleys.

And counterintuitively, not as much as you might think up on the mountain.

So people who were up there trying to skin on those first few days, they were maybe encountering a few more trouble.

But the the guns are blazing, right?

Sasha?

Yeah, absolutely.

We're in.

We're in ski season, it seems like.

So, can't start soon enough.

The early snow was was good.

At least it seemed for the mountains.

But as Aaron was saying, it didn't really hit there too much.

But, Sasha, you've been writing about some of the areas, the problems, the struggles the ski areas are having.

Yeah.

Amid, you know, the slowdown, that that's sitting here.

What are some of the big problems that folks in the ski industry are worried about?

Yeah.

Well, to go first, I mean, back to housing quickly.

I talked to someone, had smugglers Notch also in Jeffersonville, of course.

And, the the problem there is they want to hire people with these, foreign visas.

But to do that, they need to be sure they have the housing for them.

They don't want to hire too many people and have not enough housing.

The other issue there with these visas, is that they require, the government to get done.

So there's some delay there because the government's been shut down.

There's also new Trump administration rules that require them to look at people's social media, handles and the things they're posting.

So they're not saying something that, someone at the U.S.

embassy doesn't like.

So, that's actually ended up resulting in peopl being denied access to certain visas.

There's a J-1 visa, which people in South America, the southern hemisphere, use during their summer break to come here and work in the winter.

Right.

Well, and so we've been having sort of this simmering issue since the pandemic about, an inability to, get enough workers to, you know, work the robust resort industry that they have in Stowe.

Recently, Benji Adler, owner of the skinny pancake sort of chain throughout New England, he announced that the restaurant was going on hiatus for the season, pointing to an inability to hire enough workers and connecting that directly to Stowe's, affordable housing issues.

And then again, we saw, just this week with the fall foliage hospitality numbers.

You know, 14% higher than last year in September, but 5% down in October, with many hoteliers pointing to an inability to get enough laborers to turn beds over quickly enough in order to capitalize on the demand.

So the demand is there.

People want to come see the changing leaves, but there isn't enough staff to to bring these people in.

And, you know, so the municipality is working on different changes, that are hopefully going to encourage some more affordable housing.

But the question now is, you know, is it going to be enoug and is it going to be in time?

Sasha Goldstein climate change isn't making any of this any more complicated as well.

Yeah.

That's, that's that's the big thing that keeps changing every year.

We seven days does a winter preview issue, and there's always a climate related story because of course, the ski industry, which we the state depends on, is so at the whim of the weather.

And we're seeing cheers now for, for the snow and the rain.

But, when I started reporting a story about snowmaking, we were kind of in that dry spell, and I started calling people and started raining, so, there to make snow.

They need these big ponds to be full of water and to fill those ponds.

Generally, they need to pull the water from rivers and streams.

Some of it's runoff.

But, Sugarbush, for instance, pulls from the mad River.

Smuggler' notch pulls from the Lamoille.

So, it's it's really water intensive.

There are rules with the state that mandate a certain level to ensure the water isn't too low to ruin kind of the the river ecosphere systems, but otherwise they're allowed to pull some water in and get it going.

That seems to be an issue that's been resolved with the recent rain and snow.

The bigger concern from some places like Killington has been about too much water with some of the flooding we've seen.

Obviously these ski areas, many offer golf, frisbee golf, sort of these year round amenities t to hedge against poor winters.

And in doing so, you kind of open yourself up to these other natural disasters that you see most frequently in the warmer months.

So I'm not sure, folks, to realize how much water is needed to make snow during the winter.

It's a ton, isn't it?

Yeah.

The average, the highest.

There's 18 resorts that pull under not all resorts, but 18 ski areas that, pull water and Sugarbush on average over the last ten year has averaged about 440 million gallons of water each year to, open first.

They're open now and they usually stay open until late May or June.

So their shtick is kind of to be the East Coast area that's open the longest.

But guess what?

It requires making a lot of snow.

Wow.

Well, and you talked about Smuggler's Notch and and Stow on either side of those mountains.

They have an interesting sort of dichotomy as far as smugglers Notch being privately owned and, you know, consciously searching for ways to sort of improve their snowmaking on the margins.

Whereas Stowe is owned by Vail since 2017 and has really been able to invest heavily and, more efficient snowmaking resources.

Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The big thing has been these higher efficiency snowmaking guns.

They actually some of them use more water, but less energy because they don't need as much compressed air to, to shoot it out.

But there was something interesting at Smog that they're doing this, this, they, they mapped the mountain using lidar.

And basically the groomers can now see the snow depth and that, so they don't guess, you know, we need a foot here or whatever.

So as they're pushing snow, they have a better sense of where it is.

And they're saying that could reduce the amount of, water they use and energy they use as well.

Well, and then, you know, talking about how climate change sort of connects us all on this global scale.

I know that you've also been reporting on, Jamaican workers in Vermont.

You know, facing the devastation of Hurricane Melissa back home.

But, you know, talking to people like the farmer at full Brook Farm in Johnson, their Jamaican worker who have been with them for 12 years were the first ones out in the fields trying to save things.

When the flood hit in 2023, their farm was devastated and they were on the front lines.

So when the hurricane, destroyed many of their family's homes or, you know, people they knew back in Jamaica, just a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, just a couple weeks ago, the La Julia's, who owned Fallbrook Farm, where, you know, at the ready to try to help them in whatever way they could.

They raised some money.

Some other organic farmers, have also talked to me about this in the while county about raising mone and, more importantly, raising resources, sending them back with things like generators and chainsaws.

You know, in a devastated place where, you know, even a lot of money might not get you exactly what you want just because of the, the dearth of of available resources.

I don't know if that's something you saw as well.

Yeah, totally.

And there's been a big a large amount of money raised.

I mean, I think it's well into the hundreds of thousands for, these folks I know, just specifically at the apple orchards in Vermont, there's about 450, Jamaican workers who come every year.

And some of these people have come for 30 years, you know, so these are really family members to these farmers and, you know, and that was a great point about, the flooding here, how, these folks helped were huge help here.

And, they're seeing it now and they're not even there to, to help out.

And so I think there's been this, this grief, but also this really huge outpouring.

I know a lot of these orchards have, created these donation drives.

They've gotten the word out to.

And I think I've seen we've seen Vermonters, be really generous to, to support these folks.

Yeah.

It seems like the very least that they can do.

You know, when we talk about these immigration issues, this leads to another story.

Erin, I know you were reporting on and the star reporter reported on this.

This happened at, Maple Fields recently.

There was an ice raid.

What can you tell us about what happened there?

Early Wednesday morning, a bunch of unmarked vans pulled into the Maple Field gas station in Jeffersonville.

What ensued was sort of a chaotic scene.

People were being shove against cars, against windows.

Many people fled from the scene and see that the.

Yeah, the the what ended up happening is seven people were detained, including a minor who was taken from the home after, the initial raid to sort of, I guess, well, the family had an option to keep the family together.

Three of those people, have already been sent to a family detention center in Texas.

Four of them, as far as activists know, are still being detained in Vermont.

And, you know, we had a situation like this in Hardwick a few weeks ago where nine people were also arrested.

So even in, you know, rural areas like Lowell County, we're seeing more and more of this immigration action.

And then actually an important point to make is that it wasn't Ice that was involved in this.

And, especially in this region, it's often not Ice that does these actions.

It's actually, Customs and Border Protection because it's 1 in 100.

So this was not even an ice raid.

This was customs.

And, you could call it a Homeland Security raid, you know, targeted.

Right?

I mean, it's targeted.

Yeah.

Yeah, they like the Hardwick raid.

It seemed like, immigration police knew that they were going to be here.

They seem to, you know, have want to do it in places like this that are public.

That's kind of a gray area.

Nobody's going to, demand to see a warrant.

They just come in and these chaotic scenes unfold like the one here.

And most of these people that were, you know, involved in this, didn't, didn't they didn't have the grounds to remove them anyway, you know, it was just kind of a, chaotic, okay, like thing.

And I think a lot of people I covered the aftermath as well and know a lot of the residents of Jeffersonville.

It's a kind of a tiny, sleepy village with a resort, and, I think a lot of people were just, you know, totally blindsided by the fact that something that could happen in their village.

Very strange.

New normal.

Let's put it that way.

In some other news, we want to get to Kraft's.

Sperry Sterling colleges announced that they plan to close their doors this spring because of financial and enrollment challenges.

We wanted to acknowledge that breaking news.

We will certainly delve into it more deeply in the coming weeks, right here on Vermont this week.

And, before we go, I want to mention congratulations to the Sain Michael's women's soccer team, the Purple Knights had a great season, which ended yesterday with a 2 to 1 loss to Franklin Pierce.

They almost made it to the conference championship in the northeast ten but 16, three and one to finish up the season.

They also had the player of the year and Scarlett Brooks.

She's just a sophomore, so she'll be back.

And the goalkeeper of the year, Chloe Lazar.

So the Saint Max Purple Knights had a great season.

The UVM men are still in the tournament.

They are playing in their second consecutive America East Championship game this Sunday against the Bryant Bulldogs.

So go UVM as they try to defend their Division one national title.

So a bit of sports that you can watch as we get ready for the weekend.

I'm Mitch Wardley, thanks so much to our panel Aaron Colvin from the star reporter Sasha Goldstein with seven days and Olivia Geer with Geiger with Vtdigger.

Thank you so much.

I'm Mitch Wortley.

We'll see you next Friday.

Have a great week.

And.