Budget troubles exacerbated by an oopsie from DHCPF. Wait, that dept sounds familiar... Lastly, hard times = hard choices, but whose stories get told?
Budget troubles (again) exacerbated by an oopsie from the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing
According to the Sun article linked first below, our state is projected to have quite a budget shortfall,* a $900 million dollar shortfall to be precise. Take my "precise" here with a grain of salt, however, as I've seen different numbers in different articles. Hell, I've seen different numbers in the same article. This is reflective of the fact that right now we're working off forecasts and estimates.
Perhaps focus less on the actual number and more on the fact that it's big. Real big
A cooling economy, a shrinking tax base, increased spending (due largely to the state making up a shortfall in education funding)**, and the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing's oopsie in going far, far beyond its budget have all combined to put us in this state.
I gather, it depends on the numbers you use, that about 50% of the shortfall is for schools and about 15% is for the oopsie.
What is this mistake? You'll find more detail in the Denver Post article linked second below, but the upshot is that the department went over its forecasted spending by about 1% (startling how big a department this 1% overage is about $120 million--working backwards you see their budget is $12,000 million or $12 billion with a B) due to uncertainties after the Federal largesse that allowed lax rules on who could be in Medicaid ran out.
One wonders if similar issues will crop up in the future as Federal COVID blasts of money start to dwindle.
In the meantime, I'd like to point out a couple realities here, things that you as someone on a budget have likely run into more than once.
This strikes me as something of a self-inflicted problem. When you spend and spend (and spend), growing your spending at a pace that is not sustainable, something has to give somewhere. If you've ever found yourself in this state, I'm betting you think to yourself that it would've been more prudent to perhaps not have encumbered yourself with so many expenses so that it would be easier to make cuts when the inevitable oopsies and downturns take place.
Perhaps our government should have opted for similar.
The second reality here is that enough citizens screaming about property taxes to get multiple special sessions going ought to signal to our state's politicians that something is out of balance fiscally. In the same way that rising anxiety about a car needing a serious repair because you can't fund it signals your being overstretched, a credible threat from citizens that they'll rear up on their hind legs and swipe at you ought to signal the government is asking too much.
And, just like the solution to car-anxiety is to make cut backs for some budgetary breathing room, the response to citizen anger ought to be to cut back on the state's need for taxes by easing spending.
Except that it isn't.
Screenshot 1 is the rather lengthy excerpt from the Sun article that details of the Joint Budget Committee chair. Yep. The solution is not to cut spending, it's to dip into savings, especially when it comes to funding healthcare.
You know, I'm young enough to remember a time when many Democrats thought that we didn't dare dip into the state's savings to give you property tax relief, see links three and four below.
I wonder what's changed now. Likely that it's simply you getting the shaft and that's not a biggie.
*Recall that our state is required to have a balanced budget and is not allowed to borrow.
**The story is a long and complicated one, but in brief the state is obligated to ensure that all the children across the state get some minimum amount of funding for their education. If the property taxes in any given district are not enough to ensure this (either due to not being enough property to tax, or due to the state itself reducing the amounts collected), then the state must make up that shortfall.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/19/colorado-budget-deficit-tax-cuts-medicaid/
https://www.denverpost.com/2024/08/29/colorado-medicaid-budget-overrun-health-care-policy-financing/
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/colorado-2024-2025-state-budget-property-tax-cuts/
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/republicans-accuse-democrats-stingy-property-tax-relief/
Related:
The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, the one in the Sun article above that GREATLY underestimated the money needed is the same office that has been involved in some swampy deals and lying to the public to help the governor.
And then they tried to hide it from an open records request.
Complete took them to court, won, and got the emails and a settlement. More below.
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2024/06/13/complete-colorado-legal-costs-transparency-lawsuit-against-state/
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2024/03/24/emails-state-health-agency-rationalize-regulations-colorado-hospitals/
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2024/03/08/peif-judge-orders-colorado-health-agency-to-turn-over-emails/
Hard times mean hard choices ... and no choice is without consequence.
The Sun article below details how mental health services (among others -- some of the loss will be to things like co-responder programs where mental health professionals are sent out into the communities to respond to calls to law enforcement) are going to have to be cut due to a loss in funding to Medicaid as COVID-era rules and money wind down.**
I don't celebrate the loss, or desire that those needing mental health help go without, but I also wish for stories that would remind us all that compassion carries a price. That in a world of finite resources, giving to one group means a loss to another.
If we were to continue to fund this expansion of social services, more money would have had to come from somewhere. We would have to lower our standard of living to pay more taxes, or we would have had to continue down the path we are on right now: mortgaging the futures of our children and our children's children.
Who writes for them? Where is their sympathetic article?
**More going on here, but in brief, during COVID Medicaid was expanded and it was not legal to take people off of it. To get a sense of numbers here, consider the following quote from the article:
"Colorado had 1.8 million people enrolled in Medicaid during the pandemic, a historic 30% of the state’s population and up from 21% before COVID. Medicaid enrollment is now down to about 22% of the state’s population after the end of the three-year federal public health emergency put in place at the start of the pandemic."
hhttps://coloradosun.com/2024/10/02/mental-health-center-cuts/