Making Health Care Work

LOWERING HEALTH CARE COSTS—A pro-consumer health insurance exchange would bring competition to the health insurance marketplace, increasing affordability, access and choice for hundreds of thousands of families and small businesses.

Now the fight for health care reform is in Denver, and so are the health care industry’s lobbyists.

At stake is how we set up a new insurance marketplace in Colorado — the single biggest tool we have to clean up health care. The new state insurance exchange will allow small businesses, those of us who buy health care on our own, and the uninsured to shop for cheaper health care plans and find some relief from increasingly brutal premiums. 

Done right, the exchange will save billions and level the balance of power between consumers and the health care industry — driving the industry to cut waste and prioritize high-quality care.

The health care industry knows how high the stakes are and has spent millions to influence health care reform.

In order to help us fight back against the kind of price jumps and trap-door coverage we’ve all been suffering, COPIRG is pushing to see that the exchange:

1. Increase competition, by forcing health insurance companies to present their plans in standard formats that allow for apples-to-apples comparisons.
2. Have high standards, so that bad plans aren’t an option.
3. Be open to as many Coloradans as possible. Limits that shut some individuals and businesses out of the exchange would reduce its ability to lower costs — and will be a key tactic that industry lobbyists use to weaken it.
4. Negotiates for better plans. By demanding better care for less cost, the exchange can use the collective power of hundreds of thousands of Coloradans to finally demand that the industry do better.
5. Be accountable to the public.