Health care to receive a quick cure
By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Staff Columnist
Jonathan Swift couldn’t have conjured a more sarcastically modest proposal. On Monday, the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform sent out a news release asking “anyone who is interested” to submit a plan to solve the state’s health care crisis.
“Proposals,” the release stated, “must be submitted no later than April 6, 2007.”
The commission’s chairman, Bill Lindsay, understands how silly it sounds to give people a month to draft a fix for one of the state’s most vexing problems. But he says the blue-ribbon panel has been meeting publicly since November.
Though it didn’t formally publish guidelines for proposals until Feb. 22, Lindsay said, the players who will shape Colorado’s most important public policy in decades have been all over this since last year. That’s when the state legislature established the commission.
“It’s a tight timeline and challenging,” admitted Wade Buchanan, president of the Bell Policy Center, which consults with several groups submitting proposals. “But it’s not like people are starting from scratch today.”
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