Source: The Gazette
The drive for single-payer health care won’t die. Gov. Jared Polis just signed legislation to spend $400,000 on a new “study” of how to bring government-run health care to the state.
It’s a colossal waste of time and money. Decades of evidence from Canada and the United Kingdom show that government-guaranteed health insurance leads to long waits for subpar care at astronomical cost to taxpayers.
Senate Bill 45 directs the Colorado School of Public Health to “analyze draft model legislation for implementing a single-payer, nonprofit, publicly financed, and privately delivered universal health care payment system for Colorado that directly compensates providers.”
In other words, the law tasks the university not with “studying” single-payer but with drafting a blueprint for a government takeover of the state’s health insurance system.
Who is clamoring for this effort? Nine years ago, Colorado voters rejected single-payer at the ballot box — by a 79% to 21% margin.
The mandarins tasked with writing this report should familiarize themselves with what’s going on in Canada and the United Kingdom. North of the border, Canadians face a median wait of 30 weeks — more than seven months — to receive treatment from a specialist after a referral from a general practitioner. In some provinces, the median wait for specialty care is closer to a year.
And because private insurance is banned in most cases, Canadians who can’t wait often leave the country and pay out of pocket for care. In 2017, more than 200,000 Canadians did just that.
Private clinics are beginning to proliferate in Canada, though they’re technically barred from charging patients for care that the public health insurance system nominally covers. Patients typically pay out of pocket for this privately delivered care.
Britain’s government-dominated health system is no better. Roughly 6.24 million individuals representing 7.4 million cases are stuck on National Health Service wait lists. More than 3 million have been waiting for more than 18 weeks.
Because of these waits, nearly 1 in 8 Britons now pays for private health insurance.
British health authorities routinely deny access to cutting-edge drugs in order to save money. In March, the National Health Service in England said it wouldn’t cover a life-extending prostate cancer drug called abiraterone “based on overall affordability.”
Supporters of SB 45 seem to think single-payer in Colorado will be different. But look at how America’s government-run systems are performing.
Roughly 1 in 4 physicians nationwide do not accept new Medicaid patients, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.
That’s largely because the program pays less than Medicare and private insurance. If Colorado implements single-payer — and ratchets down reimbursement rates to Medicaid levels — then physicians and other providers will leave the state.
Then there’s the cost. In Canada, the average family of four pays about $17,700 Canadian — $12,700 in the United States — in hidden taxes just to cover the cost of its public health coverage.
Oregon modeled a single-payer proposal and projected $12.3 billion in new payroll taxes and $7.6 billion in new income taxes. Colorado is 40% more populous, so the price tag for a single-payer system in the Centennial State surely will be higher.
Last year, California’s legislature failed to advance a bid to install single-payer in the Golden State. The estimated cost of the measure was roughly $400 billion — a year. That’s nearly double what the state spends each year from its general fund.
Colorado can “study” single-payer all it wants. It won’t change the facts. Wherever the government becomes the sole provider of health coverage, we see longer waits, limited access and doctors heading for the exits.
Coloradans rejected single-payer once. They haven’t forgotten why. Their elected leaders shouldn’t either.
