Bernie Buzz

Ninety years ago this week, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating the most popular government program in our nation’s history. For nearly nine decades, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American on time and without delay.

This past weekend, more than 5,000 Vermonters packed in and around Virtue Field in Burlington to watch the Vermont Green take on Seattle’s Ballard FC for the USL League Two national championship.

We are thankful to have over 200 food shelves, meal sites and organizations providing food assistance throughout Vermont. It has been reported that community food shelves serve as many as 86,000 Vermonters each year, with food coming from both local and national resources, including local Vermont farms and grocery stores. Read on below for information on how to find a food shelf or meal site near you.

One of the beautiful things about representing the great state of Vermont is that we have some of the best employee-owned companies in the country and I am very proud of that fact. This week, I invited one of those companies — the King Arthur Baking Company, headquartered in Norwich, Vermont — to come to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee about their good work.

The Bernie Buzz team had a chance to sit down with April and learn more about what a day in the life of a nurse midwife looks like – and why people may choose to work with a midwife. April also told us about the challenges facing rural health care, and midwifery in particular. She explains that when rural hospitals are struggling, they usually start by closing their labor and delivery units, as we are sadly seeing now at Copley Hospital.