Colorado Democrats hosted a Medicaid day of action Tuesday in response to a Republican-led budget resolution that instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reduce the federal deficit by at least $880 billion over the next decade.
While the bill does not directly mention cuts to Medicaid, the Congressional Budget Office published a letter on March 5 finding that under the current legislation, the committee would have to make cuts to the program based on what budget jurisdiction they have. The bill passed the House a few weeks ago and is now in the Senate.
“We are here to try to tell the stories of what will happen to Colorado if we let Donald Trump and the Republican's agenda pass,” Rep. Brittany Pettersen said at a press conference at Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge Tuesday afternoon.
Those stories included 10-year-old Quinn Harris who was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer in 2022 after injuring her rib while rock climbing.
“Within a matter of days, Quinn had surgery for a port, a tumor biopsy and began aggressive chemotherapy. I had to immediately stop working at my small business as a mental health therapist, and my income immediately went to zero,” said Quinn’s mom, Brooke. “Not only were we scared that Quinn could die; we also became worried that we could lose our home. This is one of the reasons Medicaid is so important for childhood cancer families like mine.”
But it’s not just extreme cases of care that would be at risk with the funding cuts proposed by the current legislation.
Colorado’s Medicaid program is called Health First Colorado. About 1.2 million people, about a quarter of the state’s population, rely on it for everything from doctor checkups to preventative care to ER visits, according to the latest data from the agency. And Medicaid covers an estimated 40 percent of children in the state as well as an estimated 44 percent of child births.
“This is the next generation of Coloradans, and we want to give them the best start that we can,” OB-GYN Lindsay Eun said. “We feel that every woman, regardless of who is paying for their healthcare, deserves excellent care, compassionate care.”
Medicaid also provides funding to the state’s behavioral health care programs which allow people like Pettersen’s own mother, who struggled with addiction, to get the care instead of being seen in already overburdened emergency centers.
“Everything that we've done to increase capacity, to build up support in rural Colorado where we see some of just the lack of access to care, especially around behavioral health services, all of it is about to be completely dismantled,” she said.
CEO and president of the Colorado Hospital Association, Jeff Tieman, said the cuts would likely hit local economies hard, especially in rural areas.
“We estimate, for example, at the Colorado Hospital Association that we could lose up to $27 billion in funding to the state of Colorado for Medicaid over the next five years," he said. "If these cuts go into effect, that is a lot of money.”
In addition to the CBO letter and local estimates, a new report from the Urban Institute found the total loss of funding from the federal government to Medicaid under the current budget resolution would be roughly $1.13 billion. It also warns the cuts could financially devastate hospitals and cause costs to skyrocket for uncompensated care — medical services for which the hospital received no payment.
Meanwhile, Republicans say they want to make programs like Medicaid more efficient, claiming the cuts aim to reduce fraud.
“As a general matter, I do believe that we should be looking at something like having some sort of a work requirement (for Medicaid),” Rep. Jeff Hurd said during a telephone town hall on March 11. “What I will tell you is that we need to make sure that we use those Medicaid dollars effectively. If you look at the expansion in Medicaid spending in our country, it's certainly exploded in part because of the (Affordable Care Act) expansion.”
Medicaid is jointly funded by both the federal and state governments. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it cost the feds $618 billion in 2024, making it one of the most costly programs after Medicare, Social Security and defense spending.
