In a narrow strip of shade on the west side of a suburban Wal-mart, a small but important part of self-government in Colorado played out in a few dozen short conversations on a recent warm morning.
A polite woman greeted customers coming from the parking lot. “Do you want to help keep violent criminals in jail?” she asked.
That was good enough to draw about one in three of the passing shoppers to her table. Most signed on for keeping more suspects locked up.
But when she asked them to sign a petition on health care, they said they wanted to read up on it. “This is just to put it on the ballot,” she urged. “Just to let the voters decide.”
Despite the cool response the measure got from the small sample I witnessed, backers of the measure to block the federal government from requiring Coloradans to buy health insurance are confident they will have more than enough signatures (76,047) by Monday to put the question to voters.
The woman gathering signatures wouldn’t give me her name. She did tell me she has no health insurance. It struck me that she was working against her own interest, furthering a ballot measure that could make it harder for her to get medical insurance. She signed the petition, she said, “just to get it on the ballot.”
That throwaway line from petition circulators has always bothered me. It suggests you should sign whether you support the policy or not. Hey, let the voters decide what they want, the thinking goes. Don’t buy it. Your signature and a little more than 76,000 others are enough to move it closer to becoming law. That’s more powerful, in my mind, than an anonymous vote cast into a pool with more than a million and a half others in a statewide election.
If voters pass the measure, the anonymous petition circulator can expect to see costs for her health insurance pushed farther out of reach. Without health care reform, insurance premiums would rise 7 percent a year, three times the rate of income growth, according to projections by the Urban Institute.
More than 800,000 Coloradans don’t have health insurance, according to a study by the New American Foundation with the University of Denver Center for Colorado’s Economic Future.
That study was compiled last year while Congress was still debating the issue. It calculated that reform could save from $11 billion to $38 billion in Colorado in a decade.
But a lot of people in Colorado believe health care reform will make things worse.
Jon Caldara, head of the Independence Institute, a champion of free- market ideals, said “Obamacare” will limit choice and force people to wait for care. Caldara and the Institute are backing the measure that would prevent an insurance mandate here and ensure that individuals could purchase health care procedures directly from doctors outside of any insurance or government program.
He envisions an open market that will drive down the cost of health care. Caldara has a compelling personal story he makes part of the debate. His 6-year-old son was born with Down syndrome. He has had nine surgeries.
“If we had waiting lists like they do in Canada . . . I am convinced my son would not be around,” Caldara said.
Caldara and others who support the sidewalk democracy playing out in Wal-mart parking lots have already won a significant victory. In June, a judge tossed out a state law that barred backers of initiatives from paying circulators based on the number of signatures they gather. The victory cut the cost per signature in half, saving anyone seeking to put a question on the statewide ballot hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That means we’ll probably be asked for our signature just to put something on the ballot a lot more in coming summers. I’m hoping prospective signers give some thought to the cost — whether it’s higher health insurance premiums or building bigger jails to keep more people locked up.
Luke Clarke (lukeclarke@comcast.net.) lives in Golden.
