We all know Obamacare is Romneycare and Romneycare is Obamacare and that the Bay State has set the standard for everything health reform—from the individual mandate right down to ways to cut its gigantic medical bill. Or at least the media have passed along that narrative. The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece, “Same State, New Stab at Health Care,”was no exception. But it did not quite tell the whole story. The piece focused on what Massachusetts may be doing to reduce medical costs and overlooked what neighboring Vermont is already doing.

Let’s face it. Vermont is easy to dismiss. Its small population, liberal patina, and the fact that it has passed a bill that might lead to single-payer health care down the road make it a health reform outlier, far less muscular than its neighbor to the south. But we’re remiss in treating it as a stepchild when it comes to controlling health care costs. In many ways, it is trailblazer, and the press should recognize it as such.

The Journal’s piece gave the news: Massachusetts legislators unveiled legislation that would propose setting a target for the rate at which the state’s health spending should rise, which the Journal reported “would once again put the state in the forefront of efforts to remake the American health-care system.” The state, the Journal continued, is considered a laboratory, and if it manages to reduce spending, that “initiative too could eventually be imitated elsewhere.” It quoted a reliable observer from the health care cognoscenti, Paul Ginsburg, the head of a Washington think tank, the Center for Health System Change. Ginsburg said no state or initiative of the federal government has implemented such a broad effort. “There will be a lot of attention to what Massachusetts is doing,” Ginsburg told the Journal.

Anya Rader Wallack, who runs Vermont’s Green Mountain Care Board, took issue with that, telling me Ginsburg’s comment was “inaccurate.” “It leads one to believe there’s no other state working on it,” she said. “The introduction of a bill is seen as groundbreaking, when other states are already further ahead in addressing health care cost containment. “Vermont is one such state. The Green Mountain Care Board, created as part of last year’s legislation that put in place a plan for moving to a single-payer health system, “has broad responsibility and a fair amount of regulatory power,” she explained, and one of its tasks is to contain the state’s health care spending.

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