For Immediate Release
August 27, 2009

Contact: Jon Caldara, President (303-279-6536, jon@i2i.org)
Dr. Linda Gorman, Health Care Policy Center Director (303-279-6536, linda@i2i.org)

Obama Care Means High Price Tag for Coloradans

Government Plan to Cost $4,156 Per Person Over Next Decade;
Free Market Reforms Offer Better Way to Control Costs, Protect Choice.

GOLDEN, Colo.—Current plans to expand government intervention in the health care system will further inflate prices for Colorado families without improving medical services, according to a new Independence Institute study.

Titled The Prognosis for National Health Insurance: A Colorado Perspective, the study created by the research firm of Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics concludes that President Obama’s health care reform agenda will cost $4,156 per Colorado resident in additional federal and state expenditures over the next 10 years. The study also projects that the proposed government health care expansion will reduce economic growth in Colorado by 4.3 percent through 2019.

“Coloradans have good reason to be concerned about rising health care costs,” said Independence Institute president Jon Caldara. “But Obama Care is simply bad medicine.”

The Prognosis for National Health Insurance identifies the primary factor in skyrocketing health care costs over recent decades as a growing “health care wedge,” in which third parties—including government and private insurers—have assumed much more responsibility for medical payments. Consumers pay 10 percent of actual health care costs today, down from nearly 50 percent four decades ago.

In place of plans by Congress and the President to expand government’s role in health insurance, the study’s authors recommend a number of other reforms to control costs and protect quality care. They include promoting individual insurance ownership, increasing the use of Health Savings Accounts, reducing the number of mandated benefits, allowing interstate insurance purchases, and reallocating most Medicaid spending into consumer vouchers.

“True health reform means more power to the people, not government,” Caldara said.
To promote free market health care reform, the Independence Institute—a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research organization based in Golden, Colo.—also has produced two popular Internet videos highlighting problems with policies in Massachusetts and Oregon.

###

The study is available online at: http://www.lafferhealthcarereport.org/states/colorado

The videos can be viewed online at: http://www.youtube.com/user/obamahealthcare

13952 Denver West Parkway, Suite 400 · Golden, CO 80401 · www.independenceinstitute.org