Owen Foster, the new chair of Vermont’s Green Mountain Care Board, didn’t start out working in health care.
Soon after graduating law school in 2007 and joining a large firm, he was tasked with representing one of the hedge funds that fed billions of dollars to Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme.
“There were a lot of lawsuits,” Foster said. “When you lose $4 billion to Bernie Madoff, you get sued a lot.”
In 2014, he was offered a position at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont. Foster, who was born and raised in Middlebury, jumped at the opportunity to return to his home state. From there, one thing led to another.
His first health care case was a medical malpractice suit. Annette Monachelli, a 47-year-old inn operator from Stowe, had died from a brain bleed. Monachelli’s husband, Randy Stern, sued her doctor, arguing that a brain scan would have saved her life. Monachelli’s doctor worked at a clinic that qualified for federal legal protections, and Foster became the clinic’s attorney.
But as Foster dug into the case, he noticed something weird: Monachelli’s doctor had, in fact, ordered a brain scan. But she never got one.
“Something didn’t look right, and I wanted to know why,” Foster recalled in an interview. His…
