State Senate President Pro Tem Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, says she’s focused on lowering healthcare costs in the legislative session that begins next week and isn’t distracted by the possible domino effect if U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton decides to run against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

Roberts, who last June officially pulled her name from the long list of possible Bennet challengers — following a whirlwind of attention after she had floated the notion — told The Colorado Statesman she’s heard Tipton won’t challenge Bennet. She added that she’s fully focused on the 2016 state legislative session and not a potential run for Tipton’s 3rd Congressional District.

“I’ve not heard any close-to-the-source indication that Scott would make that move,” Roberts said Tipton, a Cortez Republican serving his third term. “In fact, I keep hearing the reverse — that he’s not going to do it.”

Regardless, Roberts is urging her fellow state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to focus on solving Colorado’s pressing policy problems rather than running bills aimed at making political statements during an election year.

“My concern is that election cycle 2016 is going to consume our 120 days at the Legislature, and I truly hope that we exercise some self-discipline individually, as well as our political parties, to actually get work done,” Roberts said.

But partisan rancor is already rearing its head when it comes to healthcare, with Republicans, including Roberts, making clear they’ll try to torpedo Democratic efforts to pull the state’s hospital provider fee out of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights revenue cap during budget negotiations.

And the primary legislative focus for Roberts, who chairs the Colorado Health Insurance Exchange Oversight Committee, will be running a bill to obtain a waiver under the federal Affordable Care Act to allow Coloradans seeking health insurance through the state exchange to avoid enrolling in Medicaid.

Roberts argues that the ever-expanding rolls of Medicaid recipients are increasing the costs of healthcare in her rural, eight-county district in Southwest Colorado and throughout the state because there aren’t enough providers willing to accept Medicaid patients because of low reimbursement rates.

“Colorado really needs to take the bull by the horns and come up with a better solution, and it’s sure not Sen. [Irene] Aguilar’s $25 billion solution, because that’s not going to work,” Roberts said, referring to Colorado Care, the single-payer ballot proposal spearheaded by Aguilar.

Aguilar, a Denver Democrat and internal medicine doctor, agrees with Roberts that healthcare costs need to come down in rural areas — and Medicaid reimbursement rates need to go up — but she counters that Roberts’ opt-out plan is a “non-starter” because one of the requirements of the kind of waiver Roberts is supporting is that it’s budget neutral for the federal government over the next 10 years.

Aguilar, one of only two Democrats on the Health Insurance Exchange Oversight Committee, told The Statesman there are two ways to keep healthcare costs down on Colorado’s rural Western Slope, and one of them involves a budget battle to keep the governor from cutting a nearly $150 million primary care bump that keeps Medicaid reimbursement rates close to federal Medicare rates.

Aguilar says studies show that keeping people with their primary care docs lowers costs and reduces emergency room visitation rates and hospital stays. The other way to keep costs down is to better coordinate care in rural areas for higher-cost patients with medically complex problems.

Roberts says private insurance companies have dramatically increased premiums, co-pays and deductibles in her district in order to compensate for enrollees lost to Medicaid, which she argues is simply passing the costs from the private sector to a government program.

“A lot of the policy decisions that have been made, frankly, under Democratic control, whether at the federal or state level, are driving away a lot of our working-class and middle-class Coloradans, or at least making them question whether they can stay in Colorado,” Roberts said.

Sen. Matt Jones, D-Louisville, says he assumes Roberts is acting from her experience chairing the committee — Democrats refused to speculate whether she was taking on Obamacare for political reasons — but he disagrees with her approach.

“We expanded Medicaid, which was more service than people had before, even if there weren’t doctors available,” Jones told The Statesman. “I know there’s a shortage in rural Colorado, but that’s another issue.

“There are lot more people being insured these days, and our level of uninsured is at an all-time low. The state sets the level of Medicaid reimbursement; sounds like that’s a budget problem.”

Other than calling Roberts’s bill a non-starter, Aguilar wouldn’t speculate on her motivations.

“This is my third election year in the Legislature, and I really was a politically naïve person before I came here, but my sense is that there are a certain number of bills that people put out there just to say, ‘This is what I support,’ and they know it’s not going to pass.”

After that, she says, it’s really just a matter of whether those statement bills die quietly in committee or catch fire because they’re a hot topic nationally.

“Really, the question is what kind of attitude do people come in with their bills that they know are making statements, and do they die quickly, or do they die after a lot of pain,” Aguilar said.

— davido@realvail.com

Photo of Roberts at Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce legislative briefing by Delia Palmisano of Blue House Photography, courtesy Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce