Source: Colorado Sun
The worst could be yet to come for Colorado’s troubled Medicaid program, as public agencies, health care providers and low-income patients all struggle to find their way back to something resembling the pre-pandemic normal.
At last week’s Joint Budget Committee meeting, state lawmakers learned that the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, or HCPF, overspent last year’s budget by as much as $154 million, the result of an aging population that has simply needed more care than expected.
But lawmakers say health care providers across the state are facing a very different problem. Far from benefiting from the rise in state spending, they’re seeing a surge in uncompensated care that’s straining the state’s medical safety net just as federal pandemic aid dollars run out.
“We have to find ways — financially creative or otherwise — to make sure that we are not closing clinics and losing infrastructure that we had built prior to the pandemic,” state Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville, said at the meeting. “And that strikes me as where we are at.
“I’m talking about an implosion of the safety net,” he added.
