Board members charged with recommending fixes to health insurance across Colorado dived into consultants’ analyses Thursday, gazing at graphs showing rising costs, potential savings and surging demand as they weighed four proposals and began to forge a fifth.
In an Englewood conference room next to a fitness center, with 45 interested citizens looking on, the commissioners also kept in mind a gloomy big picture: How the U.S. spends far more than other countries on health care, with often inferior results. How Colorado’s constitutional limits on raising taxes could limit efforts to spend more on health care for the poor, and how leaving today’s system in place probably would leave everybody dissatisfied.
Some commissioners indicated interest in a proposal that would provide health care to all Coloradans under a single insurance program run by a new authority – saving more than $1 billion in health spending and virtually eliminating private insurance.
Others favored a reduced role for government in health care. Those aiming for a middle ground wrestled with proposed enforcement mechanisms that would deny driver’s licenses to Coloradans who don’t buy basic health insurance and fine employers $347 a year per worker for not providing coverage.
A deeper debate about liberty and choice, versus the potential to give more people better care, must happen, said William Lindsay, chairman of the commission and president of an insurance brokerage.
“Do you want to have a system where society regards health care as a value and provides it to everybody?” Lindsay said in an interview.
Americans may be spending 16 percent of national wealth on health care, with diminishing results, he said, “but we’ve got to remember, we are not the Brits, the French or the Swedes. … If the government takes over the program and manages it, you may have a more efficient system. But sometimes efficiency isn’t good.”
Any solutions hashed out by the 27-member Colorado 208 Commission, created last year by the legislature, “is going to have us revisit TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights),” said commission member Steven Summer, president of the Colorado Hospital Association.
The state commissioners are charged with submitting to legislators five proposals for a comprehensive health care fix, with a particular eye toward providing insurance to 790,000 Coloradans with no health care beyond emergency rooms.
Commissioners should be commended for “a brave attempt,” said former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, who runs public-policy studies at the University of Denver and does not sit on the commission.
But for the long run, “my heart would be in a single- payer system,” he said, though that would be politically complicated, requiring cooperation with federal authorities.
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
