I'm not running for anything. I'm not in healthcare, not in politics, not in journalism. I work as a contractor supporting disabled veterans. I volunteer with our local fire department. I help raise a kid, and I mentor another one at Monkton Elementary. I grow enough beans on the side of a mountain in Monkton to last us through the year, at a place we call Midnight Hollow, on a road where I built a bear-proof chicken coop before I had any chickens, because the bears here will absolutely test my work.
I am, in short, an ordinary Vermonter. And about a year ago I got tired of opening property tax envelopes that kept climbing while everyone in Montpelier told me, with great patience, that the system is "complicated."
It is complicated. But not in the way they mean.
You know the feeling I'm talking about. You open the envelope and there it is. Another few hundred dollars on top of last year's increase. The retired couple two doors down put a "For Sale" sign up in March. Your friend's daughter, the one who teaches second grade in Burlington, is talking about moving to New Hampshire. Your parents are doing math on a piece of paper at the kitchen table and not saying much.
And meanwhile the news is full of officials saying they're "working on it." Maple Conference this. Yield bill that. Buydown the rate. Pass another study. Form another commission. Nothing changes. Or it changes for one year and then it changes back, worse.
What we keep being told
Property taxes are going up because schools. That's the story. Sometimes it's "declining enrollment." Sometimes it's "teacher salaries." Sometimes it's "administrative bloat." Usually it's some combination delivered by someone who very much wants you to focus on schools.
And look, I love our schools. I mentor a kid at Monkton Elementary. I see teachers who care, working hard for kids who deserve every bit of it. The problem isn't them. The problem is that "it's the schools" is a half-truth that lets the real answer hide in plain sight.
Here's what tipped me over. Two years ago, the property tax bill went up something like 10%. I can pay it. I'm lucky enough that an extra few hundred dollars doesn't change what's on my dinner table. But a lot of my neighbors aren't lucky enough, and the state isn't going to step in and cover the difference. Folks have a mighty need to eat this month.
Last year we got a small reprieve, a one-year buydown the legislature scraped together. I knew it wouldn't last. And this spring, sure enough, my district started talking about closing a school. Again. Same old script: enrollment is down, costs are up, what choice do we have? I knew before I'd opened a single budget document that closing a school wasn't going to fix the actual problem. I just couldn't yet say what would.
I got tired of half-truths. So I did what nobody else seemed willing to do. I sat down with the budgets. Read the bills moving in the legislature. Talked to people who actually understood the system: school board members, healthcare folks, people who'd worked on this for decades. I went looking for the part of the math nobody was showing me.
What I found made me angry.
The one sentence version
Vermont hospitals charge the highest prices in America. That price lands on your property tax bill.
That's it. That's the answer the "it's complicated" crowd doesn't want to lead with, because once you see it, the whole thing snaps into focus.
Here's the chain in plain English: Vermont hospitals charge commercial insurers (the ones that cover most working people) more than any other state in the country. The school employees' health insurance pool, called VEHI, is a commercial insurer. When VEHI's costs go up, school budgets go up. When school budgets go up, your property tax bill goes up. About 70¢ of every property tax dollar in Vermont goes to the Education Fund. The fastest-growing line in that fund isn't salaries. It isn't construction. It's health insurance.
That's not me being clever. The Green Mountain Care Board (the state's own hospital regulator) said it out loud last fall: "VEHI rate increases impact homeowners in the form of property tax increases across the state."[1]
That's not a typo. The hospital system that dominates Vermont (anchored by the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, with affiliates including Porter in Middlebury and Central Vermont in Berlin) collects nearly seven times Medicare's rate for the same procedures, scans, and tests. The state's own analysis says if hospitals charged 200% of Medicare instead of 289%, VEHI alone would have saved $79 million in 2022, and about $400 million over five years. That's enough money to bend the property tax curve.
And it gets worse. Some of that money, paid by Vermont teachers' premiums and through your property taxes, is being used to subsidize money-losing hospitals the network owns in upstate New York. Meanwhile, Vermont ranks 48th in the country on hospital safety scores.[3] Highest prices in America. Almost worst safety record in America. Money flowing out of state. This is what's driving your property tax bill.
So why hasn't this been fixed?
Honestly?
The same reason these things never get fixed quickly. Hospitals are the largest employer in almost every Vermont county. They have lobbyists. They have boards full of well-connected people. They have a hundred reasons why any specific reform will hurt patients, even when the evidence from other states says it won't. They have decades of telling Vermonters that any pushback on their pricing is an attack on healthcare itself.
And meanwhile, the people who could fix it (our legislators) have a thousand other things on their plates. They don't read the budget footnotes. They mostly hear from the lobbyists. And the rest of us are too busy, too tired, and too convinced that we can't change anything to bother calling them.
That's the part I want to push back on.
The hopeful part
This is actually getting fixed. Slowly. Quietly. With far less press than it deserves.
In 2025, Vermont passed Act 68, which directs the Green Mountain Care Board to cap what hospitals can charge commercial insurers at a multiple of Medicare rates by 2027. Right now, a bill called S.190 is in the legislature defining exactly how that cap works, and how much money it'll save. The hospital lobby has already cut the bill's scope from $140 million to about $55 million in capped revenue. Every dollar they claw back is a dollar that stays on your property tax bill.
Oregon did exactly this in 2019. Capped what hospitals could charge their school and state employee plans at 200% of Medicare. A Brown University study published last year in Health Affairs found Oregon saved $107.5 million in 27 months. Out-of-pocket costs went down. Patient satisfaction held steady. Every hospital stayed in-network. No closures. No doctors fled. The sky didn't fall. The lobbyists who said it would were wrong.[4]
Eight other states have also banned the physician non-compete agreements that lock doctors into Vermont's near-monopoly hospital system. Vermont's H.583 would do the same here, opening up competition that could, over time, bring primary care prices down.
The Green Mountain Care Board already cut $88 million from UVM Medical Center's FY26 budget, saving VEHI about $24 million in next year's premiums. That dropped the projected school health premium increase from the originally-feared 15–20% down to 7.3%.[5] That's millions of dollars staying in Vermont households instead of flowing out.
It's not hopeless. It's just slow. And it'll be a lot less slow if you make one phone call.
What this site is
I built Mountain of Taxes because I got tired of being told this was complicated by people who didn't want me to understand it. It's not complicated. It's just buried under a lot of jargon and a lot of people with reasons not to dig.
This is the short version. If you want the full breakdown (the cascade showing exactly where your tax dollar goes, the charts, the source documents, the calculator that tells you what reform would save your specific household), here's the math page. Every claim is sourced. Every number is linked. If you find an error, tell me and I'll fix it.
But more important than the math: the bills that fix this are in the legislature right now. And the people deciding them are listening to whoever shows up.