Like an avalanche, the Affordable Care Act has swept through the Rocky Mountain State, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. At the end of 2013, 335,000 cancellation notices went out to customers whose plans were now deemed illegal by federal regulators. Nearly 200,000 cancellations for the same reason will come at the end of this year. As for Colorado HealthOP, the state’s co-op, which was the largest insurer on the ObamaCare exchange, it shut down in October, leaving more than 80,000 members without coverage. Huge premium increases loom for the remaining exchange plans: an average of 11.7%, according to the state’s calculation.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that many Coloradans want to abandon ObamaCare and replace it with something new. What’s worrying is that the state’s liberals and progressives have been mobilizing to replace it with a single-payer system, like the ones in Canada or the United Kingdom. On Nov. 9, after more than 100,000 voters had signed a petition in support of the idea, the secretary of state’s office announced that a single-payer proposal will appear on the 2016 ballot. “ColoradoCare,” as it is being called, would replace private insurance with health care funded completely by the government, substituting higher taxes for premiums.
But one state has already tried, and failed, to implement such a scheme. In 2010 Vermont voters elected Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, who promised to institute single payer in lieu of ObamaCare. Helping design the system were advisers such asJonathan Gruber, the MIT economist often described as the architect of ObamaCare, and William Hsiao, the Harvard economist who developed the Medicare price controls that are driving up prices around the country.
The dream didn’t pan out. Despite years of planning and millions in federal grants, state mandarins couldn’t get around the pesky problem of how to pay for the new system, which would have more than doubled Vermont’s budget. They proposed an 11.5% payroll tax on businesses, which would have taken the total payroll-tax burden to nearly 20%. They mulled a new income tax with a top rate of 9.5%, in addition to existing income taxes that ranged from 3.55% to 8.95%. Even then, the single-payer system would have been deep in the red by 2020, if not sooner.
Surveying the wreckage he was about to create, Gov. Shumlin abandoned single payer last year. “The potential economic disruption and risks,” he remarked, “would be too great to small businesses, working families and the state’s economy.”
Coloradans may want to reflect on those words. Indeed, the tax proposals and budgetary concerns are remarkably similar to those faced by Vermont. The Denver Post reports that ColoradoCare would nearly double the state budget, and that backers estimate the legislature will need to levy a 10% payroll tax to fund it. This would undoubtedly harm job growth, wage growth and economic growth.
Equally concerning are patients’ difficulties with single payer where it already exists, such as the lengthy wait lists in Canada and England. The crisis in the U.K. became so acute last year—with more than 3.2 million people waiting for care—that the country’s National Health Service called in the Red Cross for help. In Canada, the average wait between a general practitioner’s referral and delivery of medically necessary treatment was more than four months in 2013,according to the Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank based in Vancouver. The former president of the Canadian Medical Association put the consequences in human terms for another Fraser report: “Delayed care often transforms an acute and potentially reversible illness or injury into a chronic, irreversible condition that involves permanent disability.”
But we don’t even have to look beyond our borders to see how single-payer fails those it is supposed to help. The Veterans Affairs hospital system is as pure a single-payer system as they come, managing both the finances of health care and the treatment. Yet a September report by the agency’s inspector general supports the conclusion that thousands of veterans may have died while waiting for the care they needed, although shoddy record-keeping made it impossible to know for sure.
As of April, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that four of Colorado’s VA facilities were among the 10-worst in terms of wait times. At one facility, 11.5% of appointments were delayed by 30 days or more. If a single-payer system can’t work for the state’s 400,000 veterans, why should anyone expect it to work for the other five million people who call Colorado home?
That is a question worth keeping in mind as the state’s voters weigh their options over the next 12 months. No public polling on ColoradoCare has been released, but the state has been trending purple in recent years. With the Affordable Care Act crumbling, progressive activists are all but guaranteed to grab the opportunity that this single-payer ballot measure represents. But if Coloradans truly want better health care at a lower cost for more people, they shouldn’t vote for another one-size-fits-all government program. They should vote for proposals—and politicians—that will give patients more choices.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-obamacares-failures-snowball-into-single-payer-1449876348
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