In addition to the various human beings standing for election around the country yesterday (or at least they claim to be humans) there were a number of ballot initiatives being decided. One of the ones that we talked about here before was a plan called ColoradoCare. This proposal would have zoomed straight past any sort of Obamacare state exchange and provided basic healthcare to all state residents totally under the control of the state government. To say that the effort came up short doesn’t begin to do it justice. It was beaten down like a rented mule. (Route Fifty)

Colorado residents soundly voted down a payment system to fund universal health care on Tuesday.

Amendment 69 would have established ColoradoCare and funded it largely through a 10 percent payroll tax. By 11:30 p.m. Eastern, a resounding 1,515,493 voters, 80 percent, were against the measure with 62 percent of precincts reporting.

ColoradoCare’s estimated $36 billion budget would have dramatically exceeded state government spending, according to the plan’s critics.

I don’t think that the problem here was that the voters of Colorado are too conservative to consider such a measure. Hillary Clinton carried the state last night and they were among the first to legalize recreational marijuana. (When you put it that way you sort of have to wonder if those two factors are related.) So if single payer is the socialist ideal, how did they manage to lose by an 80% margin? For Pete’s sake, I’m not sure you could get an 80% level of agreement on whether or not puppies are cute.

Allow me to read the tea leaves on this one for a moment. Even the pot smoking, Clinton loving Coloradans can read the writing on the wall if the letters are large enough. The first thing they no doubt noticed was that “free health care” isn’t free at all. It was going to be paid for with a whopping ten percent cut out of all their paychecks. Unless you’re quite well to do, most of you would probably at least notice 10% suddenly disappearing from your income if not winding up crippled by it. So there’s that.

But on a broader palate, this proposal can be easily viewed as the next natural progression beyond Obamacare. The people in Colorado must have access to newspapers or cable news networks is all I can figure. They might have caught wind of how people were losing their doctors, losing their number of available choices in providers, the exchanges around the country were breaking down and their rates were about to go up massively yet again. Having had a taste of all that government medicine goodness might just have put them off their feed when offered an even more government centered plan.

Obamacare is going to be on the chopping block this winter. A market based (and reality based) solution is needed. I don’t know what that’s going to end up looking like but it certainly won’t resemble ColoradoCare. That’s just not the direction the country is going in.