The Washington Times ran an article last week about a Colorado ballot initiative with the title — “ColoradoCare would replace Obamacare with statewide single-payer plan.”

One problem.

It’s not single payer.

That’s according to a memo from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

True, as the Times article points out, proponents of the plan have submitted 156,107 signatures, far more than the 98,492 required to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, to the Colorado secretary of state’s office for verification.

But PNHP reports that in the past, even the drafters of the initiative have made clear that ColoradoCare is not a single payer plan.

“ColoradoCare is a ballot initiative for a publicly financed, universal health plan for the state of Colorado that would be operated by a private cooperative under a 21-person elected Board,” according to PNHP. “While the ballot measure spells out the program’s governance and Board structure in considerable detail, key aspects of the program are not specified, and/or left to the discretion of the Board.”

More fundamentally, according to PNHP, the plan is not single payer because “multiple payers would persist – probably including private insurers.”

“As a result, it sacrifices much of the administrative savings that could be realized through a true single-payer reform because providers would have to maintain much of their current cost tracking and billing apparatus in order to apportion costs among the multiple payers,” PNHP says. “Published cost estimates for ColoradoCare overstate the savings that could be achieved through single payer, and do not take into account the additional costs entailed by ColoradoCare’s failure to adopt a full single-payer structure.”