The chief executives of eight Colorado hospital systems have sent a letter to the Polis administration, blasting what they see as the state’s poor treatment of Medicaid beneficiaries.

“We fear the state has lost its focus on uninsured and Medicaid patients, as evidenced by an 8% drop in Colorado Medicaid participants while the rest of the country saw only a 2.3% decrease,” they wrote.

As of July 2019, approximately 23% of the state’s population received coverage from Medicaid, the joint federal and state insurance program for people of low income. However, that is a drop from recent years, even as the overall insurance rate of the state has hovered at 93.5%. 

The hospital CEOs also alleged six specific instances of mistreatment, ranging from how the state’s Medicaid program “inappropriate(ly) denies claims for patients placed in observation over 48 hours,” “regularly refuses billing responsibility for behavior health patients” and “delays patients’ surgeries and admissions for urgent health care.”

“Colorado’s hospitals are important partners in the department’s quest to serve our members. When they voice a need, we take their views seriously and respond accordingly,” Marc Williams, the public information officer for Department of Health Care Policy & Financing, said in a statement.

“Colorado boasts the strongest economy in the nation and our unemployment is at an historically low rate of 2.6%. We celebrate the fact that Coloradans are rising out of poverty, which we believe is the major contributor to the reduction in Medicaid enrollment of about 4% year over year for each of the last two years.”

He did not address any of the specific allegations related to the delivery of services raised in the letter.

Signatories were the presidents and/or CEOs of Centura, Middle Park Medical Center, UCHealth, SCL Health, Banner Health’s Western Region, Estes Park Health, HealthONE, and Colorado Plains Medical Center.