Colorado might approve single-payer health care, and Seth Meyers weighs pros and cons
Heath care is a big issue in the presidential campaign, and Seth Meyers had some fun to poke at Donald Trump's vague plan to replace ObamaCare with something "terrific." But mostly he looked at single-payer plans like that proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Some Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, have questioned whether such a system would be feasible, but we may be about to get a real-life test case in Colorado," Meyers said on Monday's Late Night. If voters approve Amendment 69 in November, "the state that was one of the first to legalize weed in the U.S. could now also become the first to pass single-payer health care. Colorado doesn't care what the rest of the country thinks. Next they're going to change the state bird to the middle finger."
He cracked a slightly racy joke about Amendment 69 making sure everyone is taken care of, and how the current "clusterf--k" system is more one-sided, then looked at the pros and cons. The pros are that the current system is unfair, overly expensive, not user-friendly, and makes no sense — which is why every other rich nation went with single-payer. "The French spend less on health care than us, and they use cigarettes as pacifiers," he joked.
The downsides are it may be prohibitively expensive for a single state — Vermont scrapped a similar plan due to costs — and there will be a lot of resistance. "Scrapping our current system in favor of single-payer system would be a potentially revolutionary shift, which means it's not going to happen without tremendous pushback from the for-profit health care industry and their supporters, like the Koch brothers," Meyers noted, showing some of the ads the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity is running in Colorado. Watch below, and giggle along with Meyers when the narrator ominously intones "Amendment 69" over and over. Peter Weber
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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