Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, opposes the measure. Americans for Prosperity Colorado has said businesses would leave the state if the measure passes and that a recent study indicates that ColoradoCare has “grossly underestimated” the cost of providing care.

Reid took the Creighton audience on an abbreviated global tour of health care systems similar to the one he undertook for his book. He studied the different ways in which nations approach health care, comparing them with the U.S. system.

Reid said he found that other nations’ systems don’t all come down to socialized medicine. Many developed countries — Germany is one example — provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance. Yet Germany spends about 65 percent as much per capita on health care as the United States.

Though the United States has some of the best doctors and hospitals and leads the world in medical innovation, he said, it lags other developed nations in a number of health care quality indicators. A 2008 report by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund, for example, found that the United States ranked 19th among 19 developed countries on the “avoidable mortality” benchmark, which considers how well a system does in curing diseases that are considered curable.