CORRECTION: It was incorrectly reported that Adam Quisenberry took third place in singles horseshoes at the 55th Annual Mountain Fair. He placed first!
Medicaid cuts
Colorado’s medicaid cuts are shortchanging addiction recovery. As Colorado continues to grapple with a devastating overdose crisis, state officials are quietly pulling back the safety net for our most vulnerable neighbors. Recent cost-containment measures targeting Health First Colorado (Colorado Medicaid) are gutting addiction treatment services precisely when our communities need them most.
Under the banner of budget balancing, the state has canceled planned reimbursement rate increases for behavioral health providers, reinstated burdensome prior authorization requirements for routine drug testing and peer support, and tightened controls on life-saving medications. But perhaps most damaging is what is happening behind closed doors to residential treatment programs.
Medicaid is increasingly refusing to cover standard 30-day residential rehab stays upfront. Instead, coverage is being handed out in brief, 7-to-14-day increments, forcing clinicians to spend hours filling out bureaucratic paperwork to prove “medical necessity” just to keep a patient in a bed. When additional days are denied, patients are rushed into lower levels of outpatient care before they are clinically stabilized.
Addiction is a chronic disease, not a minor inconvenience that can be solved in a week. Short-circuiting residential treatment and burning out providers with administrative red tape doesn’t save Colorado money — it simply pushes those costs onto emergency rooms, county jails and grieving families.
We cannot claim to prioritize mental health and substance use recovery while starving the system of resources. Lawmakers and the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing must reverse these short-sighted cuts, streamline approval processes and put clinical decisions back where they belong: in the hands of doctors and treatment professionals, not state budget spreadsheets.
Thank you.
Susan Sullivan
Carbondale