March 16, 2017 11:24 AM UTC

Trumpcare: A Bloodbath For Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7’s Blair Miller reporting on a new study from the Colorado Health Institute on the effects in our state of passage of the House GOP’s Obamacare repeal/”replace” plan–and much like the Congressional Budget Office’s forecast of disaster for millions of Americans, it’s looking really bad for Colorado:

Colorado would lose $340 million in federal funding in 2020 when Medicaid provisions in the GOP-sponsored American Health Care Act run out, and the state stands to lose $14 billion in federal funds by 2030, according to analysis on the proposal released Thursday by the Colorado Health Institute.

The report says the state will have to choose between cutting up to 600,000 Coloradans from Medicaid by 2030 or making cuts to the state budget the nonpartisan CHI says would be “historic.” [Pols emphasis]

CHI’s analysis shows that once Medicaid provisions, including Colorado’s expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, are cut, that the state would start losing about $200 million in federal funding each year starting in FY 2020.

By 2030, federal funding through Medicaid to Colorado would be $2.26 billion less in that fiscal year alone than the state would have received under an unchanged ACA, according to the CHI analysis. The losses would amount to approximately $6 billion total over 10 years just from the AHCA change to a per-capita allotment system.

Like we said, these numbers quantify the local breakout of pain already forecast by the Congressional Budget Office. It should be noted that reduction of eligible Medicaid recipients is a goal of many state legislative Republicans, even as federal Republicans express concern about it. Likewise the principal defense from Democrats for the Medicaid expansion, other than the obvious public health and economic benefits of a healthier population, is that the expansion has been largely paid for with federal funds.

Whether you consider throwing hundreds of thousands of Coloradans off the health coverage rolls to be a disaster or an objective, the number who would be affected is becoming clear.

And it’s a lot of your fellow Coloradans.