Colorado Election–Amendment 69

This is interesting. I had no idea Amendment 69 was coming up, which essentially replaces our current health care system with ColoradoCare.

There’s a ton to read here. While I support some aspects of the ACA (Obamacare), I do think there are problems. I’m not sure Amendment 69 solves them.

First, it allows for more taxes to fund $2billion/year to start looking at this. While I think we should do something to start improving health care and costs, I’m not sure we want this big an experiment. We haven’t necessarily learned enough about how to move forward, and I’d prefer that we aim to see if we can better privatize health care rather than a single payer system.

At least not until we have a national single payer system.

I don’t have a fundamental issue with single payer. My friends in Canada, the UK, Norway, they think it works. Plus, you can always purchase more care if you have more money. That is, I think, a decent way of working. I’d actually prefer to eliminate most insurance and move to direct payments where people make decisions about their care, based on cost and effectiveness.

In practice, I don’t know how that works, but I’d like to see something else.

I also think having different laws in CO than neighboring (or other) states creates a race to the bottom in terms of other states abandoning their efforts and letting people come to Colorado. Not that we couldn’t handle it, but it means we have other issues. We’ve seen this with poverty programs, and I don’t want to encourage it.

I vote no.