In Colorado, fixing the health care system is about more than insurance

For years, Colorado lawmakers have worked relentlessly to reform the state’s health care system. But that work has often focused on just one narrow area: health insurance.

From expanding access to Medicaid, to setting up a state health insurance exchange, to engineering a complicated reinsurance program to creating the Colorado Option, a government-designed health plan, the brightest minds in health policy in Colorado have spent a lot of the last decade thinking about how to get more people covered at lower prices.

That focus is now starting to change, though, simply because there’s not a lot left to do on insurance, according to one of the state’s most prominent thinkers on health care and reform.

Michele Lueck has led the Colorado Health Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, for…