Weiser’s Blueprint: What his health plan won’t say before Election Day

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Phil Weiser’s Healthy Colorado Plan runs to three pillars and more than 1,600 words. It promises to move Colorado “from our current ‘sick care’ system to a true ‘health care’ system.” It calls the first pillar, Primary Care for All, “a systemwide mandate.”

It does not say what that mandate would require, whom it would bind, or what statute would create it.

The Democrat attorney general, running for governor, published the plan in April, and his Colorado Blueprint pledges, “As governor, I will follow our Healthy Colorado Plan.” Among the health plan’s commitments is one sentence that points past the election. Weiser pledges to be “learning from and working to take action on valuable guidance from the Colorado School of Public Health’s study of a state-based universal healthcare system.”

That study exists, and its report is due Dec. 31, after Coloradans have already voted.

What the study is studying

The study was created by SB25-045. The act directs the School of Public Health to analyze “draft model legislation for implementing a single-payer, nonprofit, publicly financed, and privately delivered universal health-care payment system for Colorado that directly compensates providers,” and to report its findings to the House and Senate health committees by the end of the year.

The model legislation is not hypothetical. The Colorado Foundation for Universal Health Care, whose representatives testified for the bill, drafted it, and the school has posted it publicly. The draft names the system Colorado Cares.

Under the Foundation’s draft, Colorado Cares “shall be the single payer directly to providers, with no intermediary risk bearing entities, such as private for-profit Medicare Advantage, health maintenance organizations, accountable care organizations or private equity firms.” 

The draft also repeals the article of state law that created Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s health insurance marketplace. The state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing says SB25-045 directs that same marketplace to host the meetings of the study’s advisory body.

The draft pays for the system with new fees. 

Once operational, it sets a premium fee of 6.67 percent of total payroll on employers, 3.33 percent of payroll income on employees, and generally 10 percent of non-payroll adjusted gross income on beneficiaries. 

The draft marks those rates “subject to analysis.”

None of that is Weiser’s proposal. 

Neither the Blueprint nor the health plan endorses the Foundation’s bill or single payer by name. What Weiser has said is that he will work to take action on the guidance of the study built around it.

One option among alternatives

The school states that the model legislation “was developed independently by the Colorado Foundation for Universal Health Care and it does not necessarily represent the views and recommendations of the Colorado School of Public Health.” 

It says the study will analyze the model “as one option for achieving a universal healthcare system, and compare it with alternative options.”

The research team’s own July presentation bears that out, up to a point. 

The central comparison it describes is status quo against single payer. 

A limited sensitivity analysis of a Colorado Option expansion appears alongside it. The team models provider payment at 120 to 250 percent of Medicare rates and benefits at 80 to 100 percent actuarial value, with financing drawn from the model legislation.

The team plans to review preliminary results in November. The final report follows in December.

The act itself creates no new health system. It directs a study, contingent on gifts, grants, and donations, and the school reports reaching its $750,000 fundraising goal in February.

Supporters framed the bill as a way to study feasibility before deciding what to do. 

At a March 2025 House committee hearing, representatives of the Colorado Foundation for Universal Health Care testified in favor of it, and a University of Colorado representative testified in a neutral position. A volunteer for AARP Colorado urged the committee to support it.

Opposition came from business and insurance groups. 

At the same hearing, the Denver Chamber of Commerce, the Colorado Association of Health Plans, and the national insurer trade group AHIP testified against the bill.

The advisory body created to guide the work, the Statewide Health-Care Analysis Collaborative, is made up largely of stakeholder representatives invited by the department. The department’s published roster lists 17 of them, plus a representative of Connect for Health Colorado. They include hospital, physician, nurse, pharmacist, dental, and mental health provider representatives; a state tax expert; labor, disability, rural, consumer, and homeless advocates; an advocate for historically marginalized communities; two employer representatives; the president of Cobalt, in the seat for a reproductive health care advocate; and the executive director of an LGBTQ advocacy organization.

What the plan does not price

The Healthy Colorado Plan provides no cost estimate for Primary Care for All, the Health Consumer Pact, or the plan as a whole.

It also proposes to increase enrollment and retention in public coverage. 

The plan commits to “ensuring every eligible Coloradan can enroll and stay enrolled in Medicaid and other public programs.” 

By the plan’s own accounting, about 1.2 million Coloradans, roughly a fifth of the state, were enrolled in Medicaid and other public programs as of December 2025. 

Weiser’s Blueprint separately concedes the state faces budget pressure, which it attributes to federal action rather than a recession-driven drop in revenue.

Like the Blueprint, the health plan assigns much of the problem to Washington, saying the federal government is “reversing that progress” made under the Affordable Care Act and pointing to “the retreat of federal leadership at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and beyond.”

Asked and unanswered

RMV sent the Weiser campaign questions on Aug. 28. They were asked whether his commitment to act on the study’s guidance extends to the single-payer model at its center, whether he would tell voters his position on that model before the election, what Primary Care for All would actually mandate, and what any of it would cost. 

The campaign was asked to respond by Sept. 2. It did not answer.

The plan says where Weiser wants to go and names a study whose guidance he says he will work to act on. 

What it does not say is the part voters could use in November, which is what acting on that study’s guidance would mean and what it would cost.

The study’s report is due Dec. 31.

Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series examining Phil Weiser’s Colorado Blueprint. The first, “Weiser’s Blueprint: More offices, in the name of streamlining,” published Aug. 12. The second, “Weiser’s Blueprint: The costs the plan leaves out,” published Aug. 28.