The Anderson Files: A Colorado universal

Editor-in-Chief, Caitlin Rockett Senior Editor, Emma Athena News Editor, Will Brendza Food Editor, John Lehndorff

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Founder/CEO, Stewart Sallo Editor-at-Large, Joel Dyer

Volume XXIX, Number 22

As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism, and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper.

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welcomes your correspondence via email (letters@ boulderweekly.com) or the comments section of our website at www.boulderweekly.com. Preference will be given to short letters (under 300 words) that deal with recent stories or local issues, and letters may be edited for style, length and libel. Letters should include your name, address and telephone number for verification. We do not publish anonymous letters or those signed with pseudonyms. Letters become the property of Boulder Weekly and will be published on our website. It is unlikely that any signi cant health care reforms will be coming out of Washington, D.C. any time soon. Meanwhile, there’s a growing under-reported e ort by elected o cials and grassroots activists to pass single-payer systems at the state level. Single payer is a not-for-pro t government-provided payment system which is privately delivered. It is also known as “improved Medicare for All.” e movement is happening in California, New York, Massachusetts and more than a dozen other states.

Including Colorado.

Last September, the Colorado School of Public Health released a 91-page report that concluded if we adopted single payer, we could provide health coverage to every resident, increase employment and improve overall population health. At the same time, we would spend billions less than we are spending now on health care. e State Legislature commissioned the study in 2019

A Colorado universal healthcare with passage of the Health Care Cost Savings Act (H.B. 19-1176), introduced solution you haven’t heard of by Reps. Emily Sirota and Sonya Jaquez Lewis and Sen. Mike Foote. It passed by Dave Anderson with bipartisan support. A Health Care Cost Analysis Task Force was created, which had bipartisan membership appointed by the governor and both parties’ leaders in the legislature. e group hired the Colorado School of Public Health (CSPH) to conduct the nancial analysis. e study compared three approaches to providing health care for Coloradoans. ey are: • “ e current Colorado health care nancing system in which residents receive health care coverage from private insurers and public programs, or are uninsured.” • “A multi-payer universal health care system in which all residents of Colorado are covered under a plan with a mandated set of bene ts that is publicly and privately funded and also paid for by employer and employee contributions.” at is, a system of universal coverage that covers everybody, using both private health insurance paid for by workers and

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their employers and a public insurance plan for those without private insurance. ose over 65 would be covered by Medicare. • “A publicly nanced and privately delivered universal health care system that directly compensates providers.” at is, a system of universal coverage that covers everybody, using a single state-run insurance plan. ose over 65 would be covered by Medicare. ey concluded:

“Health care reform in Colorado introducing universal health coverage that is either a multi-payer or single-payer system has the potential to increase access to care, improve health outcomes and possibly provide sector-speci c employment bene ts. Our cost estimates suggest that a multi-payer universal health care system will likely lead to small increases in the total cost of Colorado’s health care system. Introduction of a full publicly nanced and privately delivered health care system could yield signi cant healthcare savings, particularly if pricing regulations are put in place to control cost growth in the future.“ e study o ered these estimates of total annual costs under the three models studied: 1. Current system: $38.3 billion. 2. Universal coverage, mixed insurance system: $38.6 to $39.34 billion 3. Universal coverage, public insurance system: $34.62 to $37.78 billion ere is a strange silence about this signi cant scholarly study. I literally could not nd a single news article about it. Nada. Crickets. at is outrageous.

Fortunately, the Denver Post published an op-ed by T.R. Reid on the study. Reid, who was a member of the Task Force, is a journalist and documentary lmmaker who reported from four dozen countries for the Washington Post, NPR, PBS and National Geographic. He authored e Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care.

His 2008 documentary for the PBS TV series Frontline, Sick Around the World, looked at the comprehensive health care systems of ve developed economies.

Frontline asked Reid to follow up with a companion documentary, Sick Around America. However, Reid had a dispute with PBS. Reid argued that the lm came o as supporting mandated private-insurance coverage. Reid said “. . .mandating for-pro t insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world. I said I’m not going to be in a lm that contradicts my previous lm and my book.”

In his Denver Post op-ed, Reid noted that the Commonwealth Fund, which carries out comparative studies, rates Colorado as the sixth healthiest state in the union. However, some 357,000 Coloradans have no health insurance; hundreds of thousands more are “under-insured” (that is, co-pays and deductibles are so high it’s difficult to see a doctor).

Reid said, “For standard hospital procedures like maternity, hernia repair, knee replacement, etc., Commonwealth found that fees in Colorado are higher than in 40 other states.”

On Saturday, Feb. 16, the Colorado Foundation for Universal Health Care will be holding a rally at the State Capitol to demand that Gov. Polis and the state legislators act on the data in the study. “Be Bolder Before We Keel Over,” they say. Vigil at 8:30 a.m; speakers at 10 a.m.