Higher education and health care will be among the top issues dominating the 2007 session of the Colorado General Assembly. They were major campaign themes, helping the Democrats keep their legislative majorities and to add a Democratic governor to the statehouse lineup.
So now the Democrats have an obligation to carry through, and Coloradans have the criteria by which to measure the Democrats’ credibility.
Gov.-elect Bill Ritter’s three keystone issues were education, renewable energy and health care. Of those, higher education and health care have the most catching up to do. Renewable energy and K-12 education have had some help from dedicated sources of revenue.
Education, including higher education, has always represented about 60 percent of the state budget. But K-12’s share has increased steadily, aided by Amendment 23 of 2000, which required state spending to increase annually by 1 percentage point more than the rate of inflation.
Higher education’s piece of the pie chart, meanwhile, has been more than halved in the past decade or so. Once 20 percent of the state budget; it’s now less than 9 percent.
Higher education took the brunt of the cuts required by TABOR tax refunds and Amendment 23’s increased-spending mandate. It was, aside from Medicaid, the biggest remaining piece of the budget – and it was not protected by mandates. So now Colorado’s colleges and universities are at about the same spending level as the state’s prisons.
There’s a bit of a good side to this, though. It forced institutions of higher education to become more self-sufficient, relying more on grants and donors. But still it’s embarrassing that the state needs to spend $832 million more a year just to catch up with average public support for peer institutions in other states.
Renewable energy is coming along nicely. Colorado has become something of a leader in the field. It was the first to use a ballot issue – passed in 2004 – to require a percentage of the state’s electricity to come from sun, wind and other alternative sources. Xcel Energy, which fought the amendment, is now a supporter. Democrats now are talking about doubling the current requirement, from 10 percent of energy from renewable sources to 20 percent by 2015.
That leaves health care. It was the beneficiary of a cigarette tax ballot issue that also passed in 2004. But much of that money is intended to be used for anti-smoking efforts. It won’t begin to cover all the state’s needs.
One of every six Coloradans still has no health insurance. That includes an estimated 180,000 children.
The Colorado Medical Society commissioned a Mason-Dixon Poll earlier this fall in which 57 percent of the people responding said lowering the cost of care and insurance should be the top health-care priority for government in 2007, followed by 47 percent who said the top priority should be guaranteeing health insurance to every Colorado child.
At the bottom of the list, the top priority for only 25 percent, was “reducing the number and size of jury awards in medical malpractice lawsuits.”
Those findings reflect the Democrats’ overall success this year. Their expanded-coverage arguments carried more weight than the Republicans” complaints about runaway malpractice costs.
Still, as one of several ways to bring down costs, 78 percent in the medical society’s poll favored “putting tough restrictions on what can be sought in a medical malpractice lawsuit, and fining lawyers who file baseless suits.
Much of what’s in the poll ended up in Ritter’s position paper on health care. There’s no specific mention of cracking down on malpractice suits, though.
The Democrats’ top priorities reflect major concerns of their traditional constituencies, trial lawyers included. But it takes more than one election cycle to accomplish such goals. The challenge for the new party in power is to satisfy the people who got them where they are today while showing enough self-restraint to get re-elected.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
