Source: Colorado Sun

October 14, 2024

Deep program cuts and layoffs. Clinic closures. A health care provider on the brink of bankruptcy.

Colorado health care providers painted a bleak picture of the state’s health safety net at a Thursday listening session hosted by the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee.

But as bad as things have already gotten, the overarching message to lawmakers was even worse.

Unless things change — and soon — Colorado’s plummeting Medicaid rolls threaten to set off a downward spiral in the state’s public health system.

“I have never experienced a period as challenging as we now face,” said Simon Smith, the president of Clinica Family Health, which treats about 60,000 underserved patients in Boulder, Adams and Gilpin counties.

Known as the Medicaid “unwind,” the rollback of a federal expansion of who qualified for Medicaid during the pandemic was always expected to be challenging for medical providers across the state. Even resetting Medicaid levels to where they were in 2019, before the pandemic, would have meant a drop in payments to health care providers and a rise in uncompensated care.

But across the country, people who should still qualify for Medicaid have lost coverage as administrators struggle to re-verify people’s eligibility. And Colorado has disenrolled one of the highest percentages of Medicaid patients in the country — many of them incorrectly.