By Mateo Schimpf | CPR News
On Nov. 17, phones started lighting up at a first-floor office in north Denver.
Hundreds of people wanted to know whether they had won the lottery, and if not, if they had other options.
The callers were not looking for the winning Powerball combination. They wanted to know whether they would be able to afford health insurance next year.
The days leading up to Nov. 17 were excruciating for Blanca, who’s 52 and a single mother, and whose last name we’re not using because of concerns she could be targeted by federal law enforcement due to her immigration status.
She’s among 12,000 undocumented Coloradans who received subsidies from the state to get free health insurance through the OmniSalud program in 2025. But she had to wait to see if she would be selected again.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on my phone, but I know that when I open it, it will be very good news,” Blanca said in an interview in Spanish. “I have that confidence and faith that God knows who needs it.”
OmniSalud covers people on DACA and without documentation whose immigration status makes them ineligible for federal programs like Medicaid. To qualify for OmniSalud’s zero-cost premium, individuals must make less than 150% of the Federal Poverty Level, which is about $23,000 per person.
The decision to reduce tax credits on health care exchanges as part of this summer’s federal tax and spending bill, H.R. 1, also called the Big Beautiful Bill, means that OmniSalud will be able to offer fully subsidized insurance to a little more than half as many people in 2026. That’s according to Vuela for Health, an organization that does healthcare and education outreach for the local Latino community and has connected a portion of eligible residents to OmniSalud.
More than 5,000 undocumented immigrants who had previously received subsidies will have to pay full price for health insurance starting in January – a cost that Blanca said she simply can’t afford.
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