Timing is everything, and the proponents of a single-payer health insurance ballot initiative have picked the perfect time to file signatures needed to get their pipe dream onto the ballot.

Perfect for those of us who think it’s a crappy idea, and that the failure this week of Colorado’s co-op is the reminder voters need that these “too good to be true” schemes are exactly that.

And expensive.

ColoradoCare supporters would have everyone lose their private insurance, then fork over $25 billion every freaking year through a 10 percent premium tax for the state to reimburse costs. From the Durango Herald:

Employers would share employees’ costs by paying 6.67 percent of the 10 percent, leaving employees with a 3.33 percent responsibility. After seeking a waiver under the ACA, federal dollars also would be made available.

If the phrase “federal dollars also would be made available” looks familiar, it’s because that is why the co-op says it was shut down. First they wasted $23 million, and then federal dollars were no longer available.

Do we really want to go down this path, again? Can we not learn from that lesson before we waste billions more in Colorado tax dollars?

Backers of the single-payer system say they have more than 98,000 signatures necessary to get their measure on the ballot next year.

“The uncertainty that we continue to have in our health-care system … made people hungry for something a little bit different,” said state Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, a physician and proponent of the effort. “The frustration with Congress … provides a good tilling of the soil for the possibility of Colorado designing its own system.”

Enough of these experiments.

We’d give our right arm to have our free-market system insurance again. Well, we wouldn’t literally give our right arm, because our insurance doesn’t cover limbs that are ripped from the socket while a patient is trying to wrest their money from the clutches of another Ponzi scheme.