On Forbes, Ricochet’s own Avik Roy has a good summary of the implosion of single-payer healthcare in Vermont. I’ve been writing about it on my blog, but Avik’s is probably the best summary of why Green Mountain Care’s demise was inevitable. He writes:

What’s remarkable, then, about Shumlin’s attempt at single-payer health care is not that it failed. What’s remarkable is that he wasted the state’s time and resources on something that attempted to refute the laws of arithmetic. That’s four years Shumlin wasn’t spending on making the Vermont economy better for the people who live there. Small wonder that his reelection margin was razor-thin.

If there’s one quote that sums up the whole episode, it’s the one from Anya Rader-Wallack, declaring that “we can move full speed ahead…without knowing where the money’s coming from.” Green Mountain Care attempted to offer Vermonters more generous coverage than they currently had, but couldn’t figure out how to convince doctors and hospitals to accept pay cuts, nor workers to accept tax hikes.