Source: Colorado Sun

October 2, 2024

Two more community mental health centers are eliminating jobs and cutting programs as Colorado’s safety-net health system staggers from a massive drop in Medicaid rolls.

WellPower, which provides mental health care in Denver regardless of whether patients have insurance, is cutting six positions from its co-responder team that pairs social workers with city park rangers, fire and law officers. It’s also eliminating its virtual therapy program, which connected 579 patients with therapists online last year. And it’s ending its lease of Garfield House, an apartment complex where the mental health center has placed patients who needed housing.

Jefferson Center, which serves Jefferson, Clear Creek and Gilpin counties, announced Wednesday that it is laying off 25 employees, which is 3% of its staff.

“At a time when our communities need behavioral healthcare more than ever, when we are struggling in Colorado with some of the highest levels of suicide and overdose deaths, it is heartbreaking to reduce capacity and access to clinical care,” Jefferson Center’s CEO and president Kiara Kuenzler said as she announced the layoffs. “Staff reductions was a last-resort measure, after implementing all other options to balance our budget.”

Both centers, which are among 18 community mental health centers statewide, are attempting to close multi-million-dollar budget deficits, mainly caused by fewer patients with Medicaid government insurance.

Colorado had 1.8 million people enrolled in Medicaid during the pandemic, a historic 30% of the state’s population and up from 21% before COVID. Medicaid enrollment is now down to about 22% of the state’s population after the end of the three-year federal public health emergency put in place at the start of the pandemic.

Before what’s called the Medicaid “unwind,” about 6% of WellPower’s patients had no insurance. Now, that number is 19%. “Those folks still need care,” WellPower CEO Carl Clark said. “We do believe some folks lost Medicaid and they should not have. It has been a mess.”

Jefferson Center now has 6,000 clients with no insurance — 2,000 more than a year ago.

The 25 people losing their jobs are a mix of administrative and clinical professionals spread across various teams at Jefferson Center. The center is following its protocols for transitioning clients to new providers, including allowing clients to have a final session with their current therapist if needed.

Besides the decrease in Medicaid funding, the Denver mental health center has also lost local government investments and grants as funders are “pulling back and shifting their own spending in the wake of the changing behavioral health environment in Colorado,” Clark said.

“While we knew this shift would result in changes to our billing practices, the size of the initial funding decrease from the state was far larger than we could have anticipated,” he said.

The city of Denver reduced WellPower’s contract for the co-responder program by $800,000, resulting in six case managers losing their jobs. The cuts did not affect outreach workers who go out on the streets to offer services to people who are homeless, but the loss of case managers will mean diminished follow-up care. The program is separate from the STAR program, which sends mental health workers out with paramedics on 911 calls.

WellPower also saw the end of a grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that was helping fund its online therapy program, TherapyDirect. Not enough people were using the program, despite multiple marketing campaigns, to justify raising new money to keep it going, Clark said.