As the old saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole you should stop digging. Colorado is currently in something of a fiscal hole, one that has gone up quite a bit lately as Medicaid cost numbers roll in. The state’s budget shortfall has ballooned from hundreds of millions of dollars in January to estimates now a little above a billion.
If this were your household, and you were responsible with your money, one of the first things you’d likely do is start limiting how much you spend. That’s not the case at the state capitol, where they’re still furiously digging.
Some skin in the game
House Bill 25-1026, titled “Repeal Copayment for Department of Corrections Inmate Health Care” is a perfect example. The title might at first (if you’re anything like me) leave you with a question. Do prison inmates make copayments for health care? Interestingly, yes. Despite being wards of the state, there are cases where they bear a tiny cost for some care. The bill has already cleared the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee,
It’s helpful to back up and talk about the way things are now before moving forward to see what the bill would do. Inmates do not pay a cent for most ordinary health care. They do, however, get charged a small fee (ranging from $3 up to $5 with a few exceptions such as visits related to chronic health conditions) for self-declared emergency visits, self-initiated visits to the dentist, or for making an appointment and not showing up.
Sounds pretty reasonable–especially the fee for not showing to an appointment. You want care that’s not an emergency or routine? Pay just like anyone else. And besides, how could a prison inmate miss an appointment other than by choice?
House Bill 1026 would remove any and all copays, for any reason, and dump those costs onto taxpayers. The bill’s fiscal note estimates that in the fiscal year (2025-26) the bill would “…decrease the amount of state revenue required to be refunded to taxpayers by $157,179 per year.”
Those ‘free’ phone calls
When I first heard about this, it brought to mind a 2023 bill that shifted the cost of inmate phone calls from the prisoners themselves and onto taxpayers. This program has proven so popular that the demand well exceeded the original estimates in the fiscal note. As of my last check it was close to $600K over budget right now and slated to go about 5 times over the original projections in a year.
Turns out when you offer people things for “free,” they take it.
I can’t help but think that if we completely remove what modest restraints already exist on voluntary prisoner health care, that the modest sounding $150K estimate might take a similar jump. If someone else is paying and I’ve got not much else to do, why not?
State budgets can be complex things, but the current fiscal hole is not. If you can manage a household budget, you can understand exactly what is going on here: Colorado simply has a mismatch between how much we’re bringing in and how much is going out.
I am continually astounded how clueless lawmakers can be. Are they this thoughtless with their own personal finances or is it just with other people’s money? Perhaps no one is paying attention to how these little freebies for favored constituencies add up across time and with each other.
Whatever the case, it’s time to put down the shovels and stop making the hole deeper.
Cory Gaines is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack
