Whether Congressman Jared Polis wins widespread endorsement for his race to become Colorado’s next governor is a matter far from settled.
But his quick advance this week to push the critical issue of health care into the forefront of his campaign and the public’s attention should draw applause from everyone in the state.
During the Primary Election season, Polis talked regularly about a brewing health care disaster in the state, and really across the nation.
He’s spot on. Colorado is on the precipice of a calamity that’s been decades in the works.
In 2009, Congress took a route to creating the Affordable Care Act so tortuous that there no way would result in the United States would create a better way to provide affordable health care. Rather than do the logical thing, Congress tried to create a way to yield to the demands of the most vocal industry lobbyists, and the hope for a sensible system and package of reform went by the wayside.
To review, Americans demanded health care reform because people who were ill couldn’t get care because they simply couldn’t afford it. The country was trapped in a spiral down of quality and affordability.
Here we are again. Almost a decade later, health insurance rates are higher than they ever have been. Most Coloradans are getting less coverage than they did earlier because they’re trading massive deductibles for more affordable premiums. The country is spending more on health care than ever, and there is not only no end in sight, insurance companies are predicting big increases again for the next round of hikes.
The Affordable Care Act as written, doesn’t work. It can’t work. It can’t work because Congress kowtowed to a massive health care machine composed of endless factions and lobbies, many of whom provide only bureaucracy and not health care. It can’t work because Democrats caved to Republicans and refused to regulate prices and rates, which are now out of control. It can’t work because Democrats caved to Republicans and failed to create a “public option,” which was the country’s only hope for driving down market insurance prices. It can’t work because President Trump and this Congress purposely sabotaged this flailing experiment for nothing more than ill-gotten political gains.
This newspaper and hundreds of other critics of the Congress that created the Affordable Care Act warned Americans then and all along the way that compromises made by Democrats in creating Obamacare would undermine its laudable goal: increasing Americans’ access to affordable health care. It was conservatives who dismissed single payer ideas that would have done away with billions of dollars in insurance company profits and payrolls, which fill from the U.S. health care trough without providing any health care services.
We are where we began because health care is too expensive for too many once again. In fact, it’s easy to argue that it’s unaffordable for more people now than ever before. In a system that’s a gift to doctors and hospitals, which no longer have to dish out mountains of free care, no one is doing anything but raising rates as fast as they can.
Polis has talked a lot about a universal health care system like those in Canada and Europe.
It’s time we all started talking about it. Because Democrats were too weak to do the right thing almost 10 years ago, this is the health care system we have saddled ourselves with.
Democrats and Republicans refuse to set their spiteful partisan politics aside and add regulations, market competition and reforms to the ACA to at least give it a fair chance.
The route Colorado and the nation are now taking will only result in bankrupt businesses, bankrupt middle-class families and, eventually, a health-care system that collapses under its own weight.
Colorado and the nation must steer toward the only sensible and pragmatic solution available to all modern nations: universal care. We should exploit Polis’ willingness to have the conversation now so we can form a universal health care system that we can evolve to. Nothing else can work.