Even as state officials scramble to put in place major health reforms for 2014, a new proposal to guarantee medical care as a human right and create a single-payer system for all citizens is moving toward a Colorado vote.

Health Care for All Colorado and a current board member of the budding state health insurance exchange are pushing a citizen initiative to scrap the private insurance system.

The effort is separate from Sen. Irene Aguilar’s bill proposing a statewide referendum on a “cooperative” that also would be a single-payer system, whose passage with a two-thirds majority is seen as having a slim chance.

The citizens group wants to press on, bypassing requirements for a legislative super-majority to directly test state sentiment on revolutionary fixes for gaps they say were left by 2010’s national health reform.

“Access to health care is a human right, it’s not something that should be bought and sold as a commodity,” said Donna Smith, executive director of Health Care for All Colorado.

Skeptics and critics abound, even within the same progressive movement. Aguilar wonders why the organizers are competing with her effort, while conservatives deride universal coverage as an even worse idea than current big-government health reforms.

“Wait, I thought Obamacare fixed the health care system!” said Linda Gorman, health care analyst for the libertarian Independence Institute. The European and Canadian single-payer systems “are unbelievably expensive for what you get,” Gorman said.

“They eliminate treatment and physician choice, make everyone wait for care, degrade the infrastructure needed to diagnose and cure disease, and result in widespread denial of care to those who are seriously ill,” she said.

Single-payer or universal coverage supporters counter that while “Obamacare” is a major improvement in a broken health system, hundreds of thousands of Coloradans will remain without insurance because they are undocumented immigrants or are between jobs.

“It leaves an awful lot of people uninsured and underinsured,” said Smith, whose own health and insurance problems were featured in Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary “Sicko.” The ballot initiatives would guarantee health care “from the day you are born to the day you die, and it’s not tied to your employment,” Smith said.

Adding visibility to the effort is the presence of a board member for the state health exchange charged with implementing a key portion of Obamacare. Nathan Wilkes said he will continue to support that effort, which will direct federal subsidies to individuals and small groups, but added that “there’s still a long way to go” to cover gaps.

Many of the new insurance plans sold under the exchange will reflect the private trend of sky-high deductibles and large co-pays for consumers, Wilkes said. Meanwhile, 31 cents of each health care dollar is wasted on overhead, he added.

“What I’ve learned is there’s far more waste and inefficiency in private health insurance than I ever knew before,” said Wilkes. He serves on an exchange board that also includes representatives from three of Colorado’s largest private insurers, United Healthcare, Anthem and Rocky Mountain Health Plans.

The activists envision all health care payments coming from one Colorado trust fund.

Workers would contribute a payroll tax based on their income and net worth, similar to current Medicare deductions. The trust would also seek federal waivers allowing all Medicare and Medicaid spending to go into the trust as well, capturing billions more dollars each year.

Private insurance companies could still exist, covering small gaps in care not envisioned in the trust’s mandated minimums, much as insurers do with “Medi-gap” policies to Medicare clients.

The citizen effort will go to a state hearing this week for comments on the language of the proposal. Supporters would need at least 86,000 valid petition signatures to get on the fall ballot, meaning at least 100,000 for a comfortable cushion, Smith said.

Health Care for All Colorado and other supporters are holding meetings around the state explaining universal coverage and gauging support.

“This is an education process for us, to find the depth of the progressive community in Colorado,” Smith said.

Michael Booth: 303-954-1686, mbooth@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mboothdp