Fewer go uninsured

Rate of Coloradans without health coverage hits a record low, according to a new survey.

The percentage of people in Colorado who don’t have health insurance is at record-low levels, maintaining a downward trend in the uninsured rate that began with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, according to a new survey released Tuesday.

But Colorado’s top insurance regulator said she worries that a new effort in Washington, D.C., to repeal the ACA will reverse that trend.

The state’s uninsured rate fell in 2017 to 6.5 percent, according to the Colorado Health Institute’s every-other-year Colorado Health Access Survey, which is considered to be among the most authoritative sources of Colorado health coverage trends. The 2017 figure is a slight drop from the 2015 measurement. However, CHI’s Joe Hanel said the drop is not statistically significant, meaning that the state’s uninsured rate has effectively held steady since 2015.

That record-low percentage, though, still means that about 350,000 people don’t have health insurance in Colorado. The majority blame high costs for not buying insurance, though some say they simply don’t need health insurance.

Prior to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act — the federal health care law also known as Obamacare — Colorado’s uninsured rate was 14.3 percent.

“There’s a durability to the reforms that we have enacted in Colorado,” Hanel said. “It’s the new normal. Our new normal is

that there are 350,000 Coloradans without health insurance, not three-quarters of a million.”

Hanel said Colorado’s decision to expand Medicaid — which was made possible by the Affordable Care Act — is responsible for much of the drop in the uninsured rate.

Colorado insurance commissioner Marguerite Salazar, though, said a new plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act would jeopardize the state’s coverage gains.

The plan is known informally as “Cassidy-Graham,” named after the two Republican U.S. senators who have championed it — Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham.

The proposal would end the Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies that help people buy insurance. It would also cap the federal government’s contribution to traditional Medicaid, and it would turn large chunks of federal spending into block grants — basically, massive sums of money given to states that they could then use however they wanted on health care matters.

Among the things the proposal would allow states to do is eliminate ACA rules requiring insurers to cover certain types of care — like mental health services or maternity care — while also allowing insurers to charge people with pre-existing conditions more for their insurance.

Salazar said she is talking with other state insurance commissioners about writing a letter of opposition to the plan.

“I’m concerned because it rolls back the Medicaid expansion,” she said Monday. “And that doesn’t work for the state of Colorado.”

A report from the leftleaning Center on Budget Policy and Priorities found that Graham-Cassidy would shift money from states that expanded Medicaid to those that didn’t.

For instance, the report concluded that Colorado, in 2026, would receive $823 million less in federal health care funding under Graham-Cassidy than it would under current law. Meanwhile, Kansas, which did not expand Medicaid, would stand to gain an almost identical amount.