T.R. Reid: Colorado could lead reform

FORT COLLINS – A noted national advocate for health care reform said the Colorado Guaranteed Health Care Act proposed by Rep. John Kefalas and others could be a potential model for health-care reform on the national level.

“The American health-care system is just not working and we need to fix it,´ said T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter who has become a respected source of information on health care throughout the world. Reid appeared in Fort Collins on Feb. 19.

“That fix could come at the local level – it’s possible – and you’ve got legislators from Northern Colorado really actually trying to fix health-care starting at the local level,” he said. “Reform of a rotten system can start at the state level.”

Reid, in his PBS Frontline documentary, “Sick Around the World,” traveled to Canada, Britain, Germany and Japan to look at how other countries deliver health care to their residents and found they provided better care at less expense. Reid will release a book on health-care reform, “The Healing of America,” this summer.

Reid said the United States must find the political will to reform its increasingly unaffordable health-care system. “The first rule is to answer the moral question: Do we want to provide coverage for everyone?” he said.

Other nations have answered that question in the affirmative, but opponents of a move away from a private insurance-based system call such an approach socialistic and anti-capitalistic. But Reid notes that Medicare – created in 1965 and an extremely popular program with the nation’s elderly – is just such a program.

Reid said sentiment in favor of a universal health-care system appears to be growing, with 59 percent of the American Medical Society expressing support for a government-run system in a recent poll. The AMA was once a powerful foe of such a system and played a large role in defeating a move toward universal health care during the Clinton administration.

Reid said with a new president and a Democratically controlled Congress, 2009 could have been a good moment to move reform forward, but the economic collapse in the last quarter of 2008 may prevent that from happening. He said waiting till 2010 may be too late.

“2010 is going to be tougher, there’s no doubt, because (Congress people) who are running will be looking over their shoulder,” he said.

Reid said he couldn’t comment on specifics of Kefalas’ HB 1273 but said adoption of a single-payer system in the nation’s midsection could send a strong signal to other states.

“Colorado could be a great example,” he said. “If Colorado did it, people might say they’re real Americans and it would be a good model for other states.”

– Steve Porter

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