Colorado healthcare and political leaders agreed last week that President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has become the bloated catastrophe experts warned it would be.

During a press call held by accessible healthcare proponents, Colorado Democratic members of Congress and top health officials across the state detailed the damage inflicted so far after Trump and Republicans in Congress pushed through HR 1.

Experts and lawmakers said that unless Congress and Trump back off inane cuts to Medicaid imposed by HR 1, the worst is yet to come, for everyone.

The biggest misconception surrounding HR 1 is that only poor people will suffer, as if that would be a good thing. 

In reality, Trump and his allies, who regularly talk the talk about standing behind the working poor, always walk right over the top of them in their rush to help the nation’s well-heeled.

The idea, however, that HR 1 cuts to Medicaid only means it sucks for poor people is a mega MAGA myth.

The healthcare executives, physicians and elected officials gathered this week by Protect Our Care described something way more troubling. They detailed a healthcare system where everyone in Colorado, and across the nation, eventually pays a higher price for Washington’s detour to disaster.

The math isn’t hard.

When people lose Medicaid coverage, they don’t suddenly stop getting cancer or appendicitis. They don’t stop having strokes, broken arms, heart attacks or pregnancies.

Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper said, “Health doesn’t stop being a necessity.”

Instead, uninsured patients wait until manageable illnesses become crises. Then they head to the only place federal law guarantees treatment without the ability to pay: the emergency room.

Kevin Stansbury, CEO of Lincoln Community Hospital in Hugo, explained the absurdity.

“These policy decisions force patients to move from the most effective and efficient care setting, the primary care clinic, to the most expensive care setting, the hospital emergency department.”

Hospitals legally, and morally, can’t just refuse those patients.

The dilemma that the three-jobs-working poor are already facing because of what Trump and his pals have done to the healthcare system brought Lakewood Democratic Congressperson Brittany Petterson to tears in her car as she joined the remote press conference last week. 

“So the Republicans should be absolutely ashamed of the bill that they passed that put the ultra wealthy ahead of everyday Americans,” Petterson said. “We’re going to continue to remind people what they did.”

So what’s happening now is that hospitals in the metro area and the far reaches of the state treat people with no money and no insurance and no way to handle a stroke or heart attack. They absorb the loss. Then they pass those losses on to everyone else. Private insurance companies respond by raising premiums. Employers pay more. Families pay more. Taxpayers pay more. All of us do.

But wait. It gets worse.

Thousands of people have already lost affordable coverage after Congress failed to extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits. They’re now trapped in the U.S. healthcare growing dead zone. They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but nowhere near enough to afford private health insurance. They either work for themselves or an employer that doesn’t offer group health insurance. There will be more of those to come as rates continue to skyrocket.

This week, federal data revealed that about 3 million fewer people in the United States had Affordable Care Act health insurance plans in February compared with the same time last year.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, run by a vaccine denier who used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats, suggested the 13% drop in enrollment from 22.1 million people in 2025 to 19.2 million this year could be attributed to a federal crackdown on fraudulent or “phantom” enrollment, the Associated Press reported. “But health analysts said it was more likely related to the Jan. 1 expiration of federal subsidies, which caused a surge in plan costs that resulted in many people being unable to pay their premiums.”

The loss of that ACA program has been calamitous for hundreds of thousands of people.

“There is not a week that goes by when I’m back in this district when I don’t meet with families who told me that their premiums have gone from $300 to $1,500 and they can’t afford it anymore, so they’re going to lose their health care,” Aurora Democratic Congressperson Jason Crow said.

Colorado resident and patient advocate Thomas Buckley told reporters his monthly premium jumped from $30 to more than $540 after losing his ACA subsidies while he faces fighting blood cancer and another serious blood disorder.

“So there is no care. There will never be a cure,” Buckley said. “Many of us have faced a crisis like this and are unable to afford health insurance.”

It’s a time-tested true story. People in Keith’s position don’t stop needing care. They just postpone it until their condition becomes catastrophic and vastly more expensive.

But it gets even worse.

HR 1’s effects on seniors requiring nursing home and assisted-living care will be a show stopper.

Many people wrongly assume Medicare covers long-term nursing home expenses.

It doesn’t.

For countless elderly people, the financial reality is brutal. Nursing home care routinely exceeds $100,000 annually. Families spend savings, sell homes, liquidate retirement accounts and exhaust virtually everything they own before qualifying for Medicaid.

Without Medicaid, there really is no safety net.

During the news conference, I asked healthcare leaders how HR 1 would affect these seniors.

Stansbury said that although only about 9% of Medicaid recipients require long-term care, they account for roughly half of Medicaid spending because nursing-home care is extraordinarily expensive.

Denver Health CEO Donna Lynne laid out the day’s most chilling warning.

“If we start unraveling the system,” she said, “you’re going to see patients who needed care, needed a place to go…you’re going to see them on the street, quite frankly.”

Sucks to be poor, old and not rich, huh?

It sucks even worse for everyone outside of large Colorado cities.

Nearly half of Denver Health’s patients rely on Medicaid. Lynne warned her regional hospital could lose roughly $65 million annually because of HR 1. Rural hospitals, however, are in even greater jeopardy.

“We’re held together with this patchwork of reimbursement,” Stansbury said. Half of rural hospitals already operate at a loss.

When rural hospitals close, entire communities will lose emergency care.

Pregnant women will have to drive hours to deliver babies.

The ripple-tide effect of HR 1 isn’t about Republicans or Democrats.

It’s about math.

Every uninsured patient becomes someone else’s bill.

Every hospital is forced to absorb uncompensated care shifts costs onto insured patients.

Every insurance premium hike gut-punches working families who are already struggling to pay hiked-up rent, gas, mortgages, Trump tariffs, groceries and utility bills.

Each and every one of us is going to pay for this.

Sucks to be all and any of us while Trump and the current GOP Congress are running the show.

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