Health clinics in Colorado are seeing more uninsured patients than they have since the Affordable Care Act took effect a decade ago, and some of their leaders believe the state needs to prepare for a future where more people lack coverage. Colorado, like most states, has largely completed the process of ending Medicaid coverage for people who are no longer eligible. During the COVID-19 public health emergency, states suspended the process of making recipients prove they still had incomes low enough to qualify.
The majority of the half-million people who didn’t return the paperwork or otherwise failed to complete the process. So far, the state doesn’t have any data on whether those people have found other insurance. After the ACA was enacted in 2010, states and the federal government assumed the uninsured rate would continue to fall, and that’s generally what happened, said Phyllis Albritton, managing consultant for the , which represents clinics that primarily serve uninsured people and don’t receive federal funding.
That led governments and nonprofits to put fewer resources toward serving the uninsured and to focus more on things like meeting patients’ economic and social needs, she said. “The grand policy scheme has been, everyone is going to have coverage, so we don’t have to worry about the uninsured,” Albritton said. “We need to accept that there are going to be uninsured people in Colorado.
” Despite public perceptions that everyone can get affordable.
