How-do, Colorado, and welcome to another edition of The Temperature, where we have so much important health news to talk about today that … maybe we just procrastinate a little at the top here.
Are the Colorado Rockies the hottest team in baseball? Ever since the Rockies set the modern record for the fewest wins through 70 games in Major League history, they have been on a tear. They’ve won three in a row — tying them for the second-longest active win streak in baseball (behind the Dodgers, yuck).
The Rockies are now up to a robust 16-57 on the season, a pace that still has them setting the modern MLB record for futility but not by quite as large of a margin. That’s Rocky Mountain momentum!
So, has the team figured things out or does it still need help? And if it does need help, what are your ideas to fix the Rockies? I wanna hear them — the bold, the brash, the borderline cheating and irresponsible.
Send a paragraph or two (or three or four or five) to johningold@coloradosun.com so I can assemble them for a future story. No idea is too outlandish to consider because truly NO idea is worse than letting things go on as they are.
Now, let’s get to the news.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
MEDICAID
Jared Polis says he supports Medicaid work requirements. Huh?
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis may have turned a few heads this week when, at a roundtable discussion about the potentially detrimental impacts of provisions in Republicans’ massive federal tax and spending bill, he said that he supports work requirements for Medicaid.
Just not these work requirements.
The reason for his opposition to the requirements in the bill, he said, is that they impose too much administrative labor on states. Colorado has estimated it would cost $57 million per year to implement the work requirements spelled out in the bill.
Here is his remark on the issue, in full:
“It’s not workable as it is. I think we’re certainly comfortable with a work requirement that doesn’t have bureaucracy and paperwork. And I think it’s a concept the American people like, and we can figure that out. But this is not that. This is one that would drown us in paperwork and require the state to hire hundreds of bureaucrats just to process paperwork, not to mention the time that people would spend on it. We’re talking about people who are employed, who are working, and the additional paperwork to their lives. So, again, it’s a good concept, and hopefully we can get some kind of meaningful work requirement that doesn’t add a bunch of bureaucracy.”
Polis spoke at a roundtable held Monday at UCHealth Broomfield Hospital hosted by U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Democrat whose district stretches from the western Denver suburbs down to Custer County. Others in attendance included a representative from Colorado’s Medicaid program, people representing community health and mental health centers, the head of the state’s health insurance exchange, and advocates for hospitals.
Two analyses have looked at the impact work requirements could have on Medicaid coverage in Colorado.
One, from The Commonwealth Fund, concluded that 95,000 to 108,000 people could lose Medicaid coverage in 2026 if work requirements in the bill were put in place. Another, from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, found that 185,000 to 289,000 people in Colorado would lose Medicaid coverage by 2034 due to work requirements. Both organizations are often seen as left-leaning.
“This isn’t about addressing work requirements,” Pettersen said of the provisions in the bill. “This is just paperwork requirements.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
KIDS
Supporters of Medicaid cuts say they won’t impact children. Some Colorado parents don’t believe it.
On the day he went to Washington, Malakai Norick, 12 years old, neatly tucked a dark blue shirt into black pants.
He carried a blue folder with information to hand out. His sneakers squeaked across marble floors between lawmakers’ offices.
Why Malakai had come to the nation’s literal halls of power with his parents was simple: He wanted to be seen and heard by the people who will vote on the future of Medicaid, a program that is among the reasons why he is alive today.
“They had a saying for him in China that was essentially ‘the baby that should die but doesn’t,’” said Tim Norick, Malakai’s father. Tim and his wife, Kara, adopted Malakai from an orphanage in China when he was 2 1/2. The family, which includes five other children, lives in Littleton.
Malakai was born with a rare syndrome called Opitz G/BBB, which affects the development of the body’s structures and organs along the midline, from the eyes and mouth on down. This has meant numerous surgeries for Malakai, as well as other treatments, including one hormone therapy that alone costs upward of $10,000 per month.
The family has insurance through Tim’s job, but it doesn’t cover everything. And so Medicaid, which provides supplemental insurance, is both their safety net and their lifeline. During one period when they were accidentally dropped from Medicaid coverage due to an administrative mistake, Malakai’s care quickly ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.
“For so long, we’ve been like, ‘Oh, thank God we have Medicaid,’” Kara said. (The family was able to get those bills retroactively covered.)
For supporters of the giant tax and spending bill currently working its way through Congress — also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that shouldn’t change. Malakai is among the tens of thousands of Coloradans who are covered due to disabilities, and advocates for the bill say their benefits won’t be impacted.
“If you’re like one of my kiddos and you’re medically complex, if you’re a pregnant woman, if you’re kids, none of this stuff applies to you in terms of work requirements or any of the reforms in Medicaid,” U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Republican who represents a district that takes in slices of Adams, Weld and Larimer counties, said at a news conference last month. “In fact, it benefits you by preserving these resources.”
But many Colorado families with kids covered by Medicaid — and those who advocate for them — are worried that’s not what would happen.
They point to language in recent proposals that would reduce funding going to hospitals in Colorado, especially those that treat a high number of Medicaid patients. They mention rules that would require certain Medicaid recipients to have their eligibility checked twice as often or that limit retroactive coverage of Medical bills and worry that they could be swept up into that by accident or design.
Because many parents of disabled children on Medicaid in Colorado are able to receive both Medicaid coverage for themselves and employment as a caretaker for their child, they worry that dramatic changes to the program could upend the delicate system they have built.
Zach Zaslow, Children’s Hospital Colorado’s vice president of community health and advocacy, said the fear is that a deep cut to Medicaid — no matter which chunk of the program it cuts into — would require the governor and state lawmakers to take across-the-board action to balance the program’s budget while trying to maintain coverage for as many people as possible.
“That will absolutely impact kids’ access to care, even if the forcing function is because of work requirements or other changes that are targeted at adults,” Zaslow said. “Kids are inevitably going to be impacted.”
Which is why Malakai and his parents wanted to meet members of Congress or their staff face-to-face.
“It’s become such a numbers game,” Kara said of the debate in Congress over Medicaid and other provisions of the bill. “If we had a message, it would be, ‘Please don’t lose touch.’”
Watch ColoradoSun.com in the coming days for a full version of this story.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
RANKINGS
We’re No. 1! (In the Rocky Mountain region. For health system performance.)
7.4
The decline in percentage points in the share of kids in Colorado who received all doses of recommended early childhood vaccines between 2019 and 2023
Colorado ranked 10th nationally, and first in the Rocky Mountain region, in The Commonwealth Fund’s annual scorecard on state health systems.
The report, which was released today, gives Colorado high marks for avoiding unnecessary hospital use and costs, for preventive care and vaccine uptake, and for the healthy lifestyles of many Coloradans. The state doesn’t rank particularly badly in any area compared with other states, but its lowest scores come in health care access and affordability and in income disparity among residents.
Colorado, like many other states, is also losing ground on some issues. The percentage of kids who have received all doses of recommended early childhood vaccines declined by about 7 percentage points between 2019 and 2023 — to 67.8% from 75.2%. That’s a result of the COVID pandemic disrupting normal primary care but also the rising influence of anti-vaccine and vaccine-skeptical viewpoints.
You can read the full Commonwealth Fund report, which also includes insights on the Affordable Care Act’s impact on the uninsured rate and medical care that people skip due to cost, on the organization’s website.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
For the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a new poll suggests that beauty is only in the eyes of a minority of beholders.
Democrats, independents, and non-MAGA-identifying Republicans all hold unfavorable views of the bill, according to a poll by the nonpartisan health policy think tank KFF. The only groups that hold favorable views of the bill are Republicans as a whole and, specifically, MAGA-identifying Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
But those groups’ views also tilt unfavorable if told the bill would decrease funding for local hospitals or that it would increase the number of people without health insurance by 10 million.
“The public hasn’t had much time to digest what’s in the big, beautiful, but almost incomprehensible bill as it races through Congress, and many don’t have a lot of information about it,” Drew Altman, the president and CEO of KFF, said in a statement.
You can read the full KFF polling report here.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
Thanks for hanging out with us for another week.
Today is the anniversary of the day The Sun’s founding journalists announced the creation of this here news outlet with the goal of bringing community-centered, hedge fund-independent journalism to Colorado. There’s a lot that has happened over these past seven years and a lot that has changed.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is that we are out here for the good of all Coloradans and we couldn’t do this without you. Literally could not. Thank you for being a part of this journey, and if you are so inspired, here’s a link where you can donate to the cause.
Catch ya next week.
— John & Michael
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