Democratic Senators on Health & Human Services Senate Committee
November 18th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |According to Jeremy Pelzer at PolitickerCO, the Democrats have named committee chairs and members of their Senate Committees:
Health and Human Services: Chair Betty Boyd (D-Lakewood)*, Vice Chair Lois Tochtrop, John Morse (D-Colorado Springs), Morgan Carroll (D-Aurora), Linda Newell
I’ve written about Morgan Carroll’s price-control legislation before, as well as John Morse’s view that the legislature should “implement the public will.”
On Medicaid and SCHIP, the new Chair Betty Boyd has written:
This last session, I carried, and the legislature passed, legislation to streamline enrollment in the Medicaid program for children. By streamlining the enrollment process, 100,000 children who are currently eligible can enroll in Medicaid. But healthy children need healthy parents, so next year, I’d like to continue this work and focus on adults without health insurance.
Government health insurance for kids. That’s SCHIP, which encourages adults to drop private insurance, traps them in low-wage jobs, and increases insurance premiums for everyone. Cato’s Michael Cannon documents this here. As for adults, Medicaid is pretty lousy for everyone.
If she wants to make insurance affordable, why not let Coloradans by insurance the meets the requirements of other states? For example, the average non-group family plan costs $5400 in Colorado, but just $3,100 in Wisconsin (source). House Bill 08-1327 would allow Coloradans to buy a less expensive plan.
tags: Betty Boyd, Colorado health care, HB 08-1327, John Morse
