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If you’ve taken an animal to a veterinarian in Colorado recently, you know that medical care for pets isn’t cheap. Even a routine checkup for vaccines, heartworm prevention, and diet recommendations can cost a couple of hundred dollars, and any medical procedure starts at $1,000 and can reach $10,000 quickly.

A ballot measure could help or at least help prevent care from getting more expensive. Proposition 129 would create a master’s degree program to train a new level of care provider between technicians and doctors – a veterinary professional associate or VPA – who could perform surgeries, provide care, and perform other important tasks.

Most veterinarians work hard to keep their prices affordable, but the Denver Dumb Friends League – one of the most trusted animal shelters in the state — and Colorado State University  – our agricultural higher education hub – have teamed up to find ways to keep prices down.

The Dumb Friends League knows first-hand how many animals get surrendered or euthanized every year because a life-saving procedure is too expensive or an animal’s quality of life has deteriorated too far and the surgery would cost thousands of dollars to repair ligaments or remove bone spurs.

Colorado State University runs the state’s largest veterinarian college and is fighting to keep the state supplied with enough doctorates of veterinarian medicine to meet demand.

But Colorado is a pet-loving state, and there is a shortage of vets.

So the Dumb Friends League brought us Proposition 129. It changes state law and directs the State Board of Veterinary Medicine to create a licensing process for a two-year master’s program for veterinary professional associates. And CSU has drafted up a proposal to implement the master’s program.

These VPAs once licensed by the state will be able to perform almost all of the same duties as a doctor of veterinary medicine under the doctor’s supervision.

The language of the ballot measure limits the VPA’s work to what they were trained in school to do and what the licensed veterinarian assigns them to perform. The state board will create credentialing requirements for schools, and we urge them not to allow programs to be primarily conducted online. Physician assistants for human care — a master’s degree program — spend long hours in clinical care seeing patients and getting hands-on experience diagnosing and developing treatment plans. VPAs must get the same hands-on training with animals.

There will be a licensing test and required ongoing professional development.

We understand the concern from veterinarians across the state that this change could lead to substandard care. No one wants hurriedly trained employees working with animals. Large vet chains, including some who have donated money to help put this on the ballot, may abuse these new employees setting up teams of VPAs working under the supervision of a single veterinarian who doesn’t have time to ensure quality of care. There is no guarantee that any savings realized by hiring fewer doctorates in veterinary care would be passed along to pet owners.

The issue is being framed by the American Veterinary Medical Association — which opposes the measure — as a choice between substandard care and the status quo.

But for many Coloradans today the status quo is prohibitively expensive and the choice often is not seeking any medical care for their animals. The risk of poorly trained VPAs or large chain veterinary hospitals abusing the intent of the law is worth the potential outcome of more Colorado pets receiving medical care when needed because it is readily available and more affordable.

Just as humans seek care from PAs who received master’s degrees, so too pets should be able to get care from VPAs with master’s degrees.

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The Front Range’s largest safety net hospital is struggling to subsist and Ballot Issue 2Q would infuse Denver Health with $70 million a year.

The cost of shoring up this critical health system would be a .34% sales tax which translates to a little more than $.03 on every $10 someone spends on non-grocery food items in the City and County of Denver. It’s an investment this city’s voters can make for the future of health care.

Denver Health has long been one of the best trauma hospitals in the state — the place you want an ambulance to go when tragedy strikes — but it serves the state in other ways. The mom and baby unit delivers one in three children born in Denver. The quasi-governmental entity also operates primary care and mental health clinics in our schools, neighborhoods, and jails. It runs ambulances and hires our EMTs. It has dental clinics and provides vaccines.

The hospital has operated at a net loss over the last three years, although for the past two years, the new CEO, Donna Lynne, has managed to tighten the belt and solicit enough emergency funds to stay in the black — just barely. In 2022 the hospital reported a $58 million loss and in 2023 the hospital came out ahead by $11 million.

The driving factors of this fiscal crisis have been increased costs associated with rising wages and inflation, and increased uncompensated care from homeless individuals, South American migrants, and the thousands of Coloradans who were kicked off of Medicaid this year. The hospital receives state, federal and city of Denver payments for patients who cannot pay, but those payments have remained fairly stagnant for many years.

Denver Health needs a dedicated revenue stream so it can remain a thriving force for public health in our community.

For the past five years, The Denver Post editorial board has taken a conservative stance on sales tax increases, urging voters to not create new programs using the city’s limited ability to increase sales taxes.

But Denver can still afford one more sales tax increase, and this proposal is not for a new, untested, and ungovernable venture. Denver Health is one of the state’s oldest institutions. At one point it was a city agency before it became independent and it historically made its budget work by tightening its belt in lean times and expanding only when prudent.

Donna Lynne has a proven track record of leadership. She ran Kaiser Permanente in Colorado before becoming the state’s lieutenant governor under John Hickenlooper. She has pledged that the hospital will disclose exactly how the new sales tax revenue is spent during its annual “Report to the City.” The ballot language limits how the money is spent to five main categories of care: emergency, primary, mental health, pediatric, and substance abuse recovery. Additionally, when Denver City Council members voted 12-1 to refer this measure to voters, they included language stipulating that the city’s annual $30 million contribution to Denver Health would not be reduced in response to the new tax, although other economic factors could cause a reduction.

Denver Health’s financial security benefits the entire region. The hospital serves people from across the state, not just the metro area, so it is fitting that a sales tax that is paid by not only Denver residents but also visitors be the funding source for operations.

Some of the money will allow for the expansion of the hospital’s mobile clinics into parts of the city that are underserved, but most of the new dedicated revenue stream will help prevent layoffs, improve retention of staff, and prevent potential reductions in services.

However, Colorado’s elected officials cannot rest on their laurels even if Ballot Issue 2Q passes. Two other major reforms are needed.

Colorado collects a fee from patients for every night spent in a hospital and uses that fee to get federal matching dollars for Medicaid payments. Those matching dollars are then sent to hospitals through an opaque equation that must be revised based on hospitals’ needs. If the Colorado Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Enterprise Board won’t adjust the formula, state lawmakers must force their hand.

Second, Colorado lawmakers can tighten requirements for “nonprofit” hospitals to spend more of their required “community benefits” helping other hospitals and medical providers with their uncompensated care. Nonprofit hospitals should be helping to backfill their regions’ uncompensated care before they spend the money on other purposes. Kaiser Permanente set the precedent for this in 2023 when it donated $10 million to Denver Health and started a fundraising effort this year for the Denver Health Foundation.

Health care in America is broken. Everything is too expensive while our healthcare workers are often overworked and underpaid. Even the best medical providers can struggle financially and there are deep flaws with Medicaid, Medicare, and all private insurers.

But one thing we can fix, this November, is ensuring that Denver Health has the resources it needs to serve the Front Range for years to come.

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Denver voters can reject two misguided ballot measures and send a strong message to animal welfare advocates that Colorado will not bully our ranchers and hat makers out of business.

Initiated Ordinance 308 would ban new textile fur products like mink fur coats and beaver skin hats from being sold inside city limits and Initiated Ordinance 309 would ban slaughterhouses from operating inside city limits.

Both ordinances were brought forward by animal rights advocates who are part of a nationwide movement to stop the slaughter of all animals across the United States whether it’s for fur coats or food.

We disagree vehemently with the premise behind this movement. Killing animals for food and clothing is not inherently cruel. Although, we’ve seen disturbing evidence across the United States of animal cruelty at chicken, pig, cattle, and sheep farms, ranches and slaughterhouses.

So then the question becomes: Is the only slaughterhouse in Denver – a lamb processing facility called Superior Farms in the Globeville neighborhood – guilty of animal mistreatment?

So far, we have not seen any evidence of mistreatment.

Aidan Kankyoku with Pro-animal Future points to a 2019 undercover investigation done at a Superior Farms lamb slaughterhouse in California as evidence that the Globeville facility is guilty of animal cruelty. The video of the fully grown lambs being slaughtered is hard to watch. The animals thrash after their throats are cut struggling to survive as they bleed to death over the course of several minutes, but that has been the harsh reality of animal slaughter for all of human existence.

Both the California facility and the Colorado facility use high-powered electric stun guns to knock the animals unconscious before their throats are cut. Kankyoku says reports from slaughterhouses across the country show that the stunning is often ineffective and animals suffer needlessly while they bleed to death.

But there is no evidence that the Superior Farms facility in Globeville is guilty of failing to properly stun animals. This facility is not on some “worst offenders” list of slaughterhouses. Shutting down this one slaughterhouse makes no sense unless you agree with the premise that Americans should not be eating meat because killing animals is an unnecessary evil. Killing animals is hard and gruesome but it is a necessary part of the animal food chain.

Americans should demand that the U.S. Department of Agriculture improve and enforce the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Kankyoku, who lives in Denver, said animal welfare advocates have been asking for decades for small changes such as unannounced inspections and large changes such as banning high-speed slaughter so workers can take their time and reduce suffering. Nothing has come of their advocacy.

That frustration has spilled over to a ballot measure that would close a facility that likely is treating its animals as humanely as possible given that the goal is to kill the hundreds of animals arriving every day as quickly as possible and to process their skin and meat into useable parts for distribution across the world.

But the facility is also providing good-paying, steady jobs to about 160 people directly and is supporting Colorado ranchers who bring their livestock to the facility from across the state. The facility provides lamb to local restaurants and grocery stores. Colorado lambs getting shipped further away only to get shipped back as meat would be worse for the environment and the economy. Would the treatment of those lambs be better in another facility? Superior Farms developed its process for killing the animals with the consultation of Temple Grandin at Colorado State University, who is a known advocate for animal rights.

Perhaps Superior Farms needs to slow down its animal processing speed, but it certainly doesn’t need to be shut down.

Meanwhile, the fur ban comes on the tail end of a successful social movement that began with civil disobedience in New York in 1985. Today, very few people wear fur, and even fewer buy luxury fur products new. Neiman Marcus stopped selling fur clothing in 2023.

We fear this fur ban in Denver, however, will have no discernable impacts on Louis Vuitton and other couture shops that can simply move outside city limits but will impact people like Coleen Orr. Orr makes cowboy hats from beaver pelts and the products would no longer be able to ship through Denver to her store in Adams County.

Simply put we are not endorsing the fur industry but we also aren’t endorsing the anti-animal husbandry message ingrained in a fur ban.

Please vote no on these two ballot measures to support Colorado’s western roots.

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