During the Sept. 17 Commission on Medicaid meeting, Colorado legislators were told the state overspent $157.9 million in fiscal year 2025-26–a larger dollar amount than the budgets of 14 of the state’s 23 departments–mostly on Medicaid service premiums.
Despite this, some legislators–in an ongoing habit of gaslighting and denial–still shift blame the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) for their own wasteful and incompetent spending decisions.
Budget Blues
While $157.9 million is grabbing headlines, it only scratches the surface.
If legislators refuse to act decisively, that overspending will reach $443 million in the FY 2026-27 budget and $918 million in 2027-28.
Also, since before the pandemic, Behavioral Health and Community-Based Long-Term Care in particular have grown by more than 10 percent annually.
Meaning that, at current rates, these expenditures are on track to double every five to six years.
This comes at a time when Medicaid enrollment has actually declined and continues to stabilize post COVID-19.
Additionally, GOP Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer expressed her frustration with fiscal notes, pointing to one for a program that initially promised to save the state $49 million , but has yet to realize any savings.
The Governor’s office expressed regret during the meeting that the state had not taken earlier, more decisive action to curb the state’s meteoric health care costs.
Déjà vu all over again
Despite clearly being a prioritization problem, Democrat Senator Jeff Bridges, who sits on the powerful Joint Budget Committee (and who is also a candidate for state treasurer, and prime sponsor of Proposition NN) took a moment to once again blame the state’s constitutional spending limits for the predicament.
Don’t confuse this with the time he blamed TABOR after JBC Analysts told him the state would not be experiencing the budget crisis if it hadn’t spent one-time funds on programs with ongoing needs.
Nor when Bridges appeared in a social media post blaming TABOR for budget cuts (the budget still grew last year) and the need for Prop NN and a progressive income tax.
This audacious deflection came a day after the attorney general announced yet another case of health care fraud in the state, in which a doctor defrauded Colorado Medicaid for $374,000. This following several reports of mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid since the beginning of the year.
Yet, legislators like Bridges, who know better, constantly deny this evidence and instead blame Coloradans’ right to consensual taxation.
Rather than taking accountability for the gross mismanagement of taxpayer money, Bridges thinks he should keep more of it.
Actually, TABOR is not the cause of these budget challenges.
If it were, then states without similar fiscal guardrails should be in better situations than Colorado.
They aren’t, of course, because the real problem that plagues governments everywhere is overspending.
The state does not deserve the massive tax hikes it would expect from Proposition NN and Amendment 87, since it is unwilling to take real accountability for misspending taxpayers’ money.
Nash Herman is a fiscal policy analyst at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver
