May 16, 2025 11:04 AM UTC

Apparently Everyone Is Wrong Except For Gabe Evans

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• by: Colorado Pols

Two new stories out this Friday, one from one of Colorado’s most reliable conservative-leaning TV reporters, frame the predicament America’s Most Vulnerable Freshman™ GOP Rep. Gabe Evans finds himself in as an enthusiastic supporter of legislation advanced this week in the U.S. House that will, according to every responsible analysis, result in millions of Americans and tens of thousands of Coloradans losing their Medicaid health coverage. The first is from local Axios reporter Esteban Hernandez, who compares what Evans says about the budget measure he voted for this week with what, well, everyone else is saying:

Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans characterized his Wednesday vote advancing a sweeping Medicaid overhaul as helping reducing waste, fraud and abuse in the federal safety net program.

Reality check: It’s also a vote projected to prompt $625 billion in reductions over ten years, based on estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)… [Pols emphasis]

Threat level: “This would be the biggest rollback in federal support for health care ever,” KFF executive vice president for health policy Larry Levitt tells us.

It would push the number of uninsured people to 7.6 million by 2034, per the CBO.

Of course, Rep. Evans has already written off those 7.6 million people as immigrants and freeloaders. But as CBS4’s Shaun Boyd reports in another unexpectedly accurate story on the threat to Medicaid posed by the GOP trifecta in Washington, some number of those people will not cleanly fit into Evans’ “waste, fraud, and abuse” categories:

Approximately 100,000 Coloradans would lose their health care under a bill that cleared its first hurdle in Congress. [Pols emphasis]

That’s according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which says Medicaid spending would continue to grow under the bill, but it would grow by about $700 billion less over the next decade than it is projected to grow now…

Evans’ response?

“It honestly breaks my heart the fear mongering that’s occurring in this place,” said Colorado Congressman Gabe Evans, who sits on the committee and voted for the bill.

Evans was referring to protesters in wheelchairs who briefly disrupted the Energy and Commerce Committee’s markup session. But unless Evans acknowledges the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 100,000 Coloradans will lose their health coverage to free up money for extending Trump’s first-term tax cuts, the CBO might as well be the “fearmongers” too. Or local health care officials who say these new burdens are more trouble than they’re worth:

Kim Bimestefer — Executive Director the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF), which administers Medicaid — says the work requirements will cost more than they will save…

One in four Coloradans get their health coverage through Medicaid. HCPF estimates half of them are already working.

If they must verify their work status every month, Bimestefer says, it will mean a new $57 million administrative burden based on other state’s experience.

And the most important point, which is that squeezing Medicaid funds even if nominally targeted at “waste” will have an impact on everyone who uses health care services, including unquestionably qualified Medicaid patients and even the privately insured:

“If they cut monies we cannot backfill. We have to begin to cut some way shape or form across Medicaid, and that will have an impact to families, to providers, to our economy and all Coloradans as those costs need to shift that aren’t covered,” she said.

The extent of this anticipated damage, as bad as it is, assumes that attempts underway by the House Freedom Caucus to increase the pain even more are not successful. But either way, when Gabe Evans declares that Medicaid is “unsustainable” and therefore this pain deliberately inflicted on thousands of his own constituents is necessary, that is a choice Evans and the Republican majority are making. No one is forcing Republicans to take a chainsaw to federal institutions that generations of Americans have relied on. The uncertainty this process is creating for families with the prospect of 100,000 Coloradans losing their health coverage, and some number of those Coloradans as a result literally dying, is all taking place because Gabe Evans and Republicans want it to happen.

Evans is not just supporting, but willfully making himself the public face of Medicaid cuts in Colorado.

The polls say Evans is sealing his political doom. If so, let it be remembered that he did it all to himself.