From $8 Billion to $16 Billion: How Colorado’s Medicaid Budget Doubled in a Decade
By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
If you ask most Colorado families how they feel about health care right now, the answers aren’t complicated.
It’s expensive.It’s confusing.It keeps going up.
And for taxpayers helping fund Colorado’s Medicaid program — known as Health First Colorado — another question has started to surface:
If enrollment has come back down, why hasn’t spending followed?
Ten years ago, Colorado’s Medicaid agency operated on roughly $8 billion. Today it’s closer to $16 billion. The Common Sense Institute (CSI) calculates that as 101 percent growth over the decade.
CSI reports that the rest of the state operating budget grew 64 percent during that same period.
The story of enrollment is different.
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