“When you’re a candidate, whether you want it or not, the focus is on yourself because you’re the product,” he said, “and the conveyor of the idea.”
Over the next hour, Dunne shared his version of “the idea,” in the hopes that it appeals to Vermont primary voters who next Tuesday will decide between Dunne and his Democratic opponents, former Agency of Transportation Secretary Sue Minter and former diplomat and state Sen. Peter Galbraith.
For the most part, Dunne has the solidly progressive views shared by many Vermont Democrats — universal health care, universal background checks for gun owners, school reform, the legalization of marijuana, and more green energy production in the state.
But there are significant differences in the emphasis and details of those general policy positions.
A Hartland native, Dunne grew up in a farming household that was politically charged by his father, a civil rights activist lawyer, and his mother, a college professor.
At 22, he was elected to the Vermont House, the beginning of a political career that has bloomed in parallel to his business career — four terms in the House, directing an Americorps program during President Bill Clinton’s administration, and two terms in the Vermont Senate before he lost a bid for lieutenant governor in 2006.
Now 46, this is the second time Dunne has sought the state’s highest office, following a failed 2010 bid against Peter Shumlin and three other Democratic primary candidates.
Dunne sat out much of the final few weeks of his campaign to care for his brother, who had suffered a life-threatening stroke.
Living through the day after his brother’s stroke, he said, brought home what had previously been an abstract political position.
“I had specialist after specialist come into the hospital room, ask the same questions, give a different diagnosis and a different recommendation and then leave. And at the end of it, they were asking me to make a decision about his critical health care,” he said.
“And they were pretty extreme recommendations. From invasive experimental surgery to just waiting and seeing, and everything in between,” he said.
Dunne was overwhelmed by the responsibility of the decision.
“I’m pretty good at some things,” he said. “I’m not the person to be deciphering the medical information and making a decision.”
Dunne said it underscored the need for every Vermonter to have universal primary care, a key step in a sea change he says will bring the state from its current health care system to a workable single-payer health care system.
Dunne’s roadmap to single-payer coverage is a long one, with pit stops at half measures he says will prove the concept and make it more palatable to the public.
First, he said, he’ll fix the roundly-derided Vermont Health Connect website, which has been plagued by technical problems Dunne says killed Shumlin’s efforts to achieve universal health coverage.
“We can’t let a broken website get in the way of continuing toward universal health care,” said Dunne, who touts his experience at Google in project management and information technology.
“The first step is to fix the damn website and regain trust,” he said.
Next, Dunne said, he would work to establish universal primary care, part of a larger effort to reward medical providers for aggressive preventive health campaigns. Right now, he said, hospitals are reimbursed for providing emergency care, but not for community work that could avert the need for costly medical emergencies.
“I spent the last three years on the board of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, an institution as committed as any to getting to public health,” he said. “It’s leading the nation in many ways, and yet at the end of the quarter, we were banging our heads against the table trying to figure out how to get more people to use our MRI machine, and how to fill more hospital beds. And that’s nuts. And that’s a big driver of what is unsustainable.”
Dunne said the costs of a universal primary care model are $174 million, and would be paid for by setting up a payroll deduction for working Vermonters.
He said the burden on the individual would be “very small,” but that he didn’t have specific projections that were solid enough to share with the public.
The overall impact, he said, would be a reduction in healthcare premiums and workers compensation costs, and he says that, over time, it would reduce the overall healthcare costs of individuals.
With that system in place, he said, the resultant public trust and the state’s recent creation of accountable care organizations will set the stage for complete universal health care in the Twin States.
“To be able to do it in a way that’s fiscally sound would be to partner with New Hampshire, and the DHMC network actually creates the possibility of that,” he said. “That’s going to be a little way down the road.”
Speaking on education, Dunne was highly critical of Act 46, a reform bill passed last year to bend the curve on rising education costs by instituting a short-term spending cap, and pushing school districts to achieve more efficiencies by merging their administrative structures.
Dunne said he opposed the spending caps, and efforts to force districts to merge.
He said that, as governor, he would give schools more latitude.
“The language is vague enough that a governor and that governor’s secretary of education could provide a large amount of flexibility,” he said.
Rather than merging governance structures, Dunne would combat costs by pushing for statewide systems to do bookkeeping and students’ academic record-keeping. He said administrative staff could also be significantly reduced.
“I don’t believe that we need 60 superintendents for 78,000 kids. … There are medium-sized cities (with one superintendent) that have more students than the state of Vermont,” he said.
Dunne also spoke about community opposition to locally sited green energy projects, opposition that’s been largely overridden by the state Public Services Board, to the anger of many municipalities.
“When I appoint the next Public Service Board chair, which will be in February, that will be a critical part of that individual’s approach, to make sure that there is a way for us to continue our progress on renewable energy without having the kind of divisiveness that we have seen,” he said.
Dunne said he would not support a renewable energy project, such as a wind turbine, that was opposed by a local community. But, he said, he favored the idea of requiring communities to identify ways in which they could meet local targets to produce green energy, the strategy contained in the current draft of a regional energy plan from the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission.
On gun control, Dunne said he supports allowing individuals to voluntarily sign themselves onto a “do not purchase” list, which would prevent them being able to purchase guns in the future.
He also supports universal background checks, except in the case of sales to immediate family members.
After the mass shootings at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub in June, Dunne issued a statement in which he said, in part, “I will take a serious look at any proposal that reduces mass shootings and if, as governor, an enforceable bill banning assault style weapons came to my desk, I would sign it.”
“I think for a long time, Vermonters felt we were immune to the issue of gun violence,” he said in the recent interview. “But I think that things have changed and in no small part due to the heroin epidemic that is bringing a new type of violence to our state that we haven’t seen before.”
He said he supported legalization of marijuana “in a careful, controlled way.”
Dunne — who on Friday was endorsed by Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign — said he was concerned about Vermont’s aging population, and would work to make the state a more attractive destination for young people.
“I think we’re headed in a pretty dangerous place economically,” he said. “We’re now the second-oldest state in the union.”
He said that, in addition to economic development that would provide more job opportunities, he would work to expand high-speed internet and cell service to underserved communities, and also encourage a shift in the types of housing on offer.
“You need housing that is affordable and the kind of housing that young people are interested in,” he said.
“They don’t want to live in a 2-acre plot with a white picket fence. They want to live in a cool apartment that they can walk or bike to work and to socialize,” he said. “That is something that we haven’t invested in as aggressively as we should.”
Dunne supports a $200 million bond to build affordable housing throughout the state, funded by a $2 per night occupancy fee on hotel and motel stays.
The Democratic primary winner will face the winner of the Republican primary between Lt. Gov. Phil Scott and former Wall Street executive Bruce Lisman.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.