David Catron writes for the American Spectator about a questionable ballot initiative in Colorado.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, the promoters of Amendment 69 — popularly known as ColoradoCare — are certainly crazy. Despite the uniform record of failure racked up by single-payer health care systems everywhere they have been imposed, the advocates of Amendment 69 believe the results will be different in the Centennial State. Thus, they contrived late last year to add a question to this November’s ballot asking their fellow Coloradans to approve an amendment to the state constitution permitting them to demonstrate yet again that single-payer doesn’t work.
If the promoters of ColoradoCare aren’t certifiably nuts, they obviously suffer from a serious learning disability that prevents them from absorbing the lessons of similar experiments conducted in other states with “universal health care.” They have not, for example, learned anything from the failure of a similar scheme in Vermont. Green Mountain Care, as Vermont’s Democrat governor dubbed the single-payer system that he made the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, exploded on the launch pad 18 months ago. Why? For the same reason all such schemes fail — money. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, free health care is very expensive.
But such realities have little effect on the magical thinking of Amendment 69 advocates, particularly when they have the support of Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders, who last fall endorsed the scheme in a statement to the Colorado Independent: “Colorado could lead the nation in moving toward a system to ensure better health care for more people at less cost.” What Sanders refers to as “less cost” will come to a hair-raising $38 billion per year, more than Colorado’s annual state budget of $27 billion. And where, precisely, will all this money come from? Why, from the usual victims, of course.
