Health Care Industry Moves Swiftly to Stop Colorado’s “Single Payer” Ballot Measure

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/colorad-single-payer/





Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: Without additional enabling federal legislation, Colorado is not able to enact a bona fide single payer system. However, their ballot measure - Amendment 69, ColoradoCare - would improve efficiency, equity and coverage through the health care financing system in their state. Strong opposition is expected since ColoradoCare could be disruptive to some of the well-financed stakeholders, especially the private insurance industry.

The advocates of ColoradoCare are now seeking support for their effort (link above). It will be difficult to educate the public on the facts behind their reform proposal. Even when saturated with facts, the public often remains dubious because of the prevailing anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric. It is a massive project to convert the majority of the voters into passionate supporters of such a cause.

In the meantime, the opponents know that their task does not involve educating the public on the facts. They do not have to engage the other side in a information battle over the truth. They merely have to appeal to the passion of the voters. Simple rhetorical soundbites are usually enough to convince the voters that they do not have to waste their time studying some complicated government scheme in order to know how to vote on it. Just look at some of the rhetoric of the opposition group, Coloradans for Coloradans: “doubling the state budget,” “diminishing accessibility and quality,” and “creating an unaccountable, massive bureaucracy.” Who would support that? No need to try to find out the truth.

This is not just theoretical, as single payer activists supporting ballot measures in California and Oregon can attest to. In both cases, early polling was favorable, as it is now in Colorado. But closer to election time, intensive campaigns were launched by the opponents using simplistic sound bites and slogans, and the results were a disaster. California’s Proposition 186 lost by a 3 to 1 margin and Oregon’s Measure 23 lost by 4 to 1.

So what should we do? I have three suggestions.

1. Contribute to their effort in any way you can. (Today I made a donation through their website.)

2. If the effort should fail (and I hate to say that), then be sure that everyone understands that this was not a failure of single payer, especially since it is not even a bona fide single payer proposal. Rather it will have been a failure in mobilizing a social movement.

3. Above all, do not let up in the least in your advocacy for a single payer national health program - an improved Medicare for all. That is the ultimate goal, and it could be accomplished in a single step without having to first enact compromised systems in several states. Difficult? Of course. But, in spite of many attempts, how many states have enacted single payer? In this age of advanced communications, mobilizing a social movement on a national basis makes more sense than trying to do it in selected individual states.