South Pomfret, Vermont – Saskadena Six’s oldest chairlift could be knocking on heaven’s door.

As part of Ski Vermont’s What’s New press release for the 2024-25 season, Saskadena Six (formerly known as Suicide Six) announced that Chair Two won’t operate this season due to mechanical issues. Saskadena Six is currently assessing whether it’s better to repair the nearly fifty-year-old lift or replace it with a new one.

Opened during the 1978-79 season, Chair Two services beginner and intermediate terrain. It’s the next step for beginners who have become comfortable skiing around the Snow Day covered conveyor lift. In addition, the Chair Two area is home to their terrain parks.

I think this would’ve been a bigger deal a few years ago. Before last winter, when Chair Two wasn’t open, the only way to get guests to this terrain pod was by going on The Gully trail. However, The Gully doesn’t have snowmaking, leading it to rarely being open, and if it’s open, it typically has thin coverage. However, the opening of Duane’s Drop (pictured below) last season gives guests coming from the top of Chair One the ability to reach the terrain over at Chair Two. In addition, Duane’s Drop has snowmaking coverage.

However, it’s still a loss for them, as it gave beginners riding the Snow Day lift an easier lift to try out before heading up to the Summit. Getting to Chair One from Snow Day is a long skate or walking experience, especially for novices.

Other offseason projects at Saskadena Six included a flatter unloading ramp from Chair One, widening the Easy Mile trail, cleaning up the Porcupine glade, and adding more low-energy snowmaking guns.

Image/Video Credits: Saskadena Six

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Birth Aug. 6, 1960

Berlin, Vermont

Death Oct. 28, 2024

Johnson, Vermont

Details of service

A memorial service will be held on Dec 21, 2024, at Lamoille Valley Church of the Nazarene in Johnson, VT.  The service will begin at 10 a.m.

Raised in Berlin, VT, David graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Science in forestry. David was known for his work in the maple sugar industry, his love of the woods, training retrievers and helping others to learn how to work their dogs. 

He was the President of the Lake Champlain Retriever Club. As an American Kennel Club Retriever Hunt Test judge, he was known all over New England. His passion was training retrievers and also encouraging and instructing their owners. He was a Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife Hunter safety instructor as well as a member of the planning board of Johnson. 

Best of all, he will be remembered for his ready smile, grand story telling and indefatigable optimism, particularly in the last couple of years as he courageously battled cancer.

He died at home, near his woods. In addition to his three siblings, Bruce Butler, Mary Asper, Raechel Patch, and their children, he is survived by two daughters, Kathryn and Rebecca. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the David Butler Memorial Fund to help with their education.  Donations should be sent to 23 Foothills Dr, Jericho, VT  05465.

A key player in health care payment reform in Vermont announced it will shut down by the end of 2025.

OneCare Vermont allowed hospitals, independent practices, home health agencies, and other providers to collaborate by sharing financial information and other data. And they provided monthly payments to more than a dozen independent primary care practices for quality outcomes, which gave those practices an additional revenue stream on top of billing for individual services, called a “fee-for-service” model.

The organization was also an expensive player in the state’s health care system — hospitals and state agencies paid millions of dollars each year to support OneCare, which had close to 40 employees. It’s unclear whether the nonprofit’s work resulted in commensurate savings, according to a report this year from the Green Mountain Care Board.

“I think we tried to, perhaps, be too many things to too many people,” said Abe Berman, the CEO of OneCare, in an interview last week.

OneCare launched in 2016 as an experiment in how the state pays for health care, to get insurance companies and federal health insurance programs to compensate providers for quality measures with something called an “all-payer model.”

“It became a little bit of a panacea,” Berman said. “It was going to cure every ill in the system — and we know that’s not really how interventions work.”

The monthly payments that OneCare provided to some primary care practices help support patient services, like mental health care, care coordination, and other wrap-around services. After next year, those payments will go away.

“We are worried we are not going to be able to sustain that level of services for our patients,” said Dr. Toby Sadkin, a clinician at Primary Care Health Partners, a group with 10 offices in Vermont that covers thousands of patients throughout the state. Sadkin is also a member of OneCare’s board of managers.

“Another financial piece of it — and honestly this is so new that I really don’t know — but I worry about some of our practices. I worry that some of them might not actually be able to continue,” she said.

Owen Foster, with the Green Mountain Care Board, acknowledges that the end of OneCare will be a loss to some practices. But he says it was not a very efficient system.

“To get the money to primary care providers, we had a very expensive middleman, which was OneCare,” he said. “Money had to go from the hospitals to OneCare dues, out of OneCare, to individual primary care practices. That’s not a great way to pay for health care.”

He says throughout the tenure of the organization, health care payment in Vermont did not fundamentally shift away from the “fee for service” model. That was especially true a few years ago, after a big commercial insurer, BlueCross BlueShield Vermont, stopped working with OneCare.

The state is currently in negotiations with the federal government to potentially participate in another payment reform program called the AHEAD model.

“This is the only opportunity, really, to bring additional Medicare dollars and federal dollars to support primary care in Vermont,” said Jessa Barnard, the head of the Vermont Medical Society.

It’s would also be a continuation of some kind of value-based payment system that started with OneCare.

“If we’re not doing AHEAD, it really does all go away,” Barnard said.

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