The Internet is a wonderful, dreadful place. You can find information on basically any topic. That’s the plus. The negative? You can find at least two sets of ‘facts’ on almost any topic.
So it is with health care reform. The Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’) is either invincible and permanent or imploding under its own incompetence and bureaucratic weight. It is either great for all Americans or it’s the largest, most unfair wealth redistribution scheme yet devised by government. It is either a failed experiment that requires a retreat to more market-oriented delivery or it’s an experiment that did not go far enough toward government control. Either debate on Obamacare is over or it will be reopened in 2017 regardless of which party wins the White House.
You can find vigorous and detailed defense of all of those statements and others.
Now bringing all of this closer to home is ColoradoCares, an effort to implement single-payer health insurance in Colorado. As of last week proponents had collected more than enough signatures to put a measure on the November 2016 ballot asking voters to pass a 10 percent payroll tax increase on everybody earning income in Colorado to provide insurance plans for residents. Employers would pay 6.67 percent of the 10 percent with employees paying the remaining 3.33 percent.
The annual cost would be $25 billion.
The pitch is that they want to replace Obamacare by seeking a waiver from it. The rub for those who support free markets is that the replacement will be government health care.
Whether this is good or bad for the state economy and business will be hotly debated in the months ahead, but two things are certain: you will be able to find two sets of ‘facts’ on the matter and Colorado just became ground-zero for the national debate about whether health care should be in private hands or run by the government. I guess that means another thing is certain: expect a lot of money to be spent in Colorado over the next year by opponents and proponents along with the attendant commercials and ads.