The president spoke at a town hall in Grand Junction, Colo., this Saturday. Most of the news reports focused on the president’s appearence in the state as a matter of political calculus. Colorado is an important swing state — Obama won here in November, but his approval rating in the state has soured considerably. (I’m writing this from an internet cafe in Boulder. I might have more to say about the president’s sinking approval ratings in the Mountain West later this week.)

But as anyone familiar with Colorado knows, Grand Junction isn’t exactly a hotbed of Democratic activism. According to Chuck Pabst, the chairman of the Mesa County GOP: “We like to call ourselves the ruby red part of the state. Right now in our there’s only one elected Democrat in the county — and that’s the coroner.” Obama won’t pick up many votes in western Colorado.

What Grand Junction is known for is being a trailblazer in cooperative health care. A few news reports this weekend picked up on this symbolism, but given the talk of a possible demise for the public option yesterday, in retrospect the appearance in Grand Junction seems like a signal that Obama was already moving away from the public option and more towards co-ops. “We’re doing something right and we’re doing it with private nonprofits and insurance companies. The ‘public option’ is something that people are really angry about and he’s shopping for another alternative and I think he’s found it here in Grand Junction,” Pabst told NRO.

So what is going on in Grand Junction? “The reason they’re doing that is because Grand Junction has one of the lowest welfare reimbursment rates in the country. The health-care community is very active,” Pabst said. “There’s the hospital, there’s the Rocky Mountain Health Plans, which is the local non-profit insurance company — which is headquartered here but it’s regional — that have partnered up over the last 30 years and have partnered

up to create cooperative health care. In doing so, they have created various clinic and palliative-care programs that vastly lower the expenses to the government-run Medicare system.” (Politics Daily has a slightly more detailed summary of health-care innovation in the area.) The health-care system in Grand Junction has been extensively studied and received considerable attention in Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article on health-care costs that’s been influential in the White House.

It’s doubtful that everything going on with the health-care system in Grand Junction would please strict free marketeers, but for Pabst the bottom line is this: “We’re doing something right and we’re doing it with private nonprofits and insurance companies,” Pabst said. “It’s proof that it can be done and done without government assistance.”

If you’re going to monkey with the health-care market, the lesson from Grand Junction seems to be that it’s best to do it at as local a level as possible. This may not bode well for health-care co-ops created at the federal level. A major reason why cooperative health care appears to work in Grand Junction is that the community is intimately involved in their health-care decisions. As proof of this, Pabst notes that the area has one of the country’s highest rates of health savings account usage, which is hardly one of the Democrats’ preferred health-care fixes.

In Grand Junction, better health care is about helping individuals make better decisions and letting the community set its own standards and find its own solutions. Let’s hope the community-organizer-in-chief understands that, when it comes to health care, community organization is preferable to drastic federal intervention.