(Host) News stories divide into events and issues. Events get short, intense coverage, and then fade. Issues don’t fade because the questions they contain are usually hard to answer.
As Steve Delaney reports in this section of our year-in-review, one issue in particular turned up again and again.
(Delaney) Health care dominated the flow of news like no other issue in the past year. It is still a work in progress.
New House Speaker Gaye Symington appointed a special health care reform committee, which quickly decided that every Vermonter should be covered by health insurance, and that payroll tax money should pay for it in part. Workers who didn’t take health coverage, and employers who didn’t offer it, would be taxed to help pay for the expanded coverage.
Governor Douglas rejected that, early and often. His idea for funding health care expansion was a surcharge on the premiums of people already paying for health insurance. That drew about 4% of public support.
The Legislature passed a modified version of the House Bill, and reached an accord with the Senate, if not the Administration.
Tensions got so high that by adjournment, Douglas and Symington had given up on being polite.
(Douglas) “This is a theatre at the end of the session. To be perfectly blunt, I think what we’re seeing is Amateur Hour.”
(Symington) I think the comment about Amateur Hour was totally inappropriate and completely disrespectful. And I would really hope that the chief executive officer of the state could treat the Legislature with more respect than a comment like that indicates.”
(Delaney) Douglas vetoed the health care bill, mostly because it contained a payroll tax.
Republicans complained that a commission appointed by the Legislature to collect public input on health care reform was too expensive and too biased. Then the Governor ran his own public hearings, and his people made it clear that all ideas were welcome except the ones he had vetoed.
Both sides held their meetings and proclaimed their willingness to work together.
But they didn’t come close to bridging their gaps, and late in the year political analyst Eric Davis was saying they probably couldn’t do it.
(Davis) “Governor Douglas and the Democrats in the Legislature have fundamental disagreements about the role of the public sector in providing health care. And it’s my expectation that these differences will not be resolved in the series of hearings they’re having this fall, and in the winter Legislative session. So this will really go to the voters in November of 2006 for a decision.”
(Delaney) And as the Legislature prepares to go back into session, public surveys continue to identify health care reform as the most pressing issue facing the state. And its leaders continue to fight over how to do it.
Donald Fell sits on death row in a Federal prison in Indiana, five months after he was given the death penalty for the brutal murder of Rutland resident Theresa King five years ago.
It was the first capital punishment trial in Vermont in a half century. If Fell and another defendant had committed their crime in Vermont, it would not have been a Federal case, but they went across the state line into New York, where the killing occurred. If former Attorney General John Ashcroft had not cancelled a plea bargain Fell made a year after the crime, it would not have been a capital punishment case.
The defense argued at trial that Fell’s early life was so awful that that it was a factor against the ultimate punishment.
Prosecutors argued that his actions in the King murder were so awful that he must be held accountable to the full extent of the law, and in July, the jury agreed.
VPR’s John Dillon covered the trial, and the moment of truth at its climax.
(Dillon) Shortly before noon the word went out in the Federal Courthouse that the jury had reached a verdict. The courtroom was packed and it was extremely quiet.
Judge Sessions asked the Court Clerk to just go to the bottom of the form and read the verdict.
When the Clerk read the death sentence the only sound was this scream from one of Fell’s supporters. Donald Fell himself barely moved. But Terry King’s family began to cry quietly. For them the verdict was at the end of an extremely emotional time.
Barbara Tuttle, Terry King’s sister, spoke with reporters outside the Courthouse.
(Tuttle) “And I just became overcome with emotion, because I said, this is for you, Terry. And it is. It’s for her. She deserved that – to have justice. And all we wanted was to have twelve people listen to it, you know, and the public listen to what that man did to her. And they did, and obviously they felt the same way we did.”
(Delaney) Not everyone does. The debate over capital punishment in Vermont that was renewed by the Fell trial has abated, but is not resolved. For VPR News, I’m Steve Delaney.