March 03, 2025 12:08 PM UTC

Medicaid Day Of Reckoning Fast Approaching For Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Following the passage last week of the Republican framework budget resolution setting the stage for massive cuts to funding for a broad range of vital government services like Medicaid, Colorado Public Radio’s John Daley took a detailed look at the impact of the expected cuts on individual congressional districts across the state. And as we’ve been dreading for weeks as Republican spending plans migrated from the hypothetical to the real world, the harm the Republican budget will do to Medicaid in particular could be disproportionately painful here in Colorado–and especially in the two districts currently represented by Republicans with the highest percentage of Medicaid patients on the rolls:

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…

But if Congress cuts funding the state will lose more than $1 billion in federal money to cover those Coloradans. It would be one of hardest hit states, according to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is a philanthropic group focusing on health.

State leaders would need to cut spending elsewhere to cover the cost. Or they would have to remove hundreds of thousands of people from Medicaid. The group estimates Colorado would have to increase its Medicaid spending by 31 percent to make up for those proposed cuts.

“That’s obviously a pretty major hit,” said senior policy advisor Kathy Hempstead, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, noting Colorado would have to come up with a billion dollars or drop people’s Medicaid coverage. “If Colorado were to drop their expansion population, that would also be a really large bump in your uninsured rate,” she said. “The estimate is about 230,000 additional people would become uninsured, which would be a 50 percent increase in your uninsured rate.”

The problem is not difficult to explain: since Colorado took full advantage of federal funding made available to expand Medicaid coverage eligibility under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, our state is more exposed to cuts Republicans are seeking to the program today. And because of the unique fiscal limitations imposed on Colorado via the 1992 so-called Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), the state has no easy way of making up the difference. The result is that if Republicans follow the guidelines established in their spending resolution last week, thousands of Coloradans must lose their health coverage.

Which beings us to the two congressional districts set to be most impacted by Medicaid cuts, both represented by freshman Republicans: Rep. Jeff Hurd in CO-03 and Rep. Gabe Evans in CO-08. Responding to CPR’s questions about the impact of the budget proposal they voted to pass on their own constituents, both Hurd and Evans dodged the question and pivoted to the falsehood that a reduction of “waste and fraud” will cover the spending cuts, not patients losing coverage. As usual, Hurd was the less combative of the two:

In an interview with Colorado Matters, [Hurd] told host Ryan Warner, he believed it was important to “preserve Medicaid benefits for Coloradans,” particularly in his district, while making the program more efficient over time.

“If we’re looking at efficiencies, we’re not talking about realizing any efficiencies over the course of one year,” Hurd said. “They would be spread out over the course of 10 years and making sure, again, that we are delivering benefits to people who need them. Absolutely a priority for me.”

Evans is pushing back on critics. He posted on X that the Republicans’ bill is not a tax break for billionaires or large corporations, which is how Democrats have described it. He said Colorado is responsible for administering the program, but “unfortunately, we’ve seen where Colorado’s priorities lie. They’re spending tens of millions of dollars funding healthcare for illegal immigrants. Instead of cutting fraud, waste and abuse.”

In a Tweet Friday, Gabe Evans attacked Colorado’s “ruling Democrats” for, in his words, “paying illegal immigrants and dead people” with Medicaid funds:

Evans is referring to a recent audit from the federal Office of the Inspector General that found Colorado may have paid Medicaid providers some $6 million to care for “enrollees who were dead.” Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing disputes this, saying many of these bills were for people who were at the time of care in fact not dead. Either way, we’re talking about 0.046% of the state’s $13 billion Medicaid budget. As for “health care for illegal immigrants,” that’s a program that just started at the beginning of this year–and even with demand higher than anticipated when the law was passed in 2022, the expected price tag is about $50 million.

No one supports “wasting money,” so it’s always a popular hobby horse to ride. And despite the benefits to everyone’s health that come from expanding health coverage, immigrants are ripe targets for demonization who Gabe Evans never misses the chance to vilify. But to justify the massive cuts to Medicaid funding Republicans voted for last week with these comparatively tiny amounts of “waste and abuse,” or even the politically riskier trying to ensure immigrant populations in Colorado can get preventative care that in the long run saves money, is a textbook case of throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.

In both cases, Evans is counting on anecdotes and emotion to overcome data and reason.

It will only work until reality in the form of constituents made to suffer is no longer deniable. That moment of truth is coming fast.