By Brandi Bradley

In a famous scene from the classic movie “Casablanca”, the police captain defends the closure of Rick’s Café by remarking to Humphrey Bogart‘s character, “I’m shocked, shocked to find there’s gambling going on here.” Thereupon the Bogart character hands the chief his gambling winnings, revealing both the hypocrisy of the captain and the ludicrous pretext he used to close the café.

The concerns we have heard from Colorado Democrats (and will hear again in the upcoming legislative session) about increases in health care premiums in Colorado contain the same level of hypocrisy — the fact of the matter is during the past seven years, Colorado progressives have mandated dozens of new coverages along with onerous regulations, actions we Republicans warned at the time would hurt Colorado residents. The chickens are coming home to roost in the form of higher premiums, but many people don’t understand why. We’ll get to that.

Though there are debates in Washington, D.C. about the future of Medicaid, much of the concern about health care in Colorado is focused on health care premiums not funded by the government. The commissioner of insurance, for example, has warned premium price increases could reach over 28% in 2026.

That wouldn’t be surprising given the amount of inflation that ravaged the country under the leadership of Democrats and President Joe Biden from 2021 thru 2024 (about 20%). But there are additional and more fundamental reasons for the price increases coming our way in Colorado.  

An abbreviated list of the mandates imposed since 2019 includes coverage for sex-change operations (HB25-1309; SB23-189), abortions (SB23-189; SB25-183), infertility treatments (HB20-1158; HB22-1008), mental health and substance abuse screenings and treatments (HB19-1269; SB20-007), and added fees or requirements to provide private health insurance for people in the country illegally (SB20-215; SB22-1289). Democrats have imposed these mandates on insurance companies, and it’s small wonder these companies have to raise prices in order to stay in business and realize a return on their investments.

But for many people, the insurance companies are the enemy, the money-grubbing enemy of the people. That’s why we must look at the data. According to latest figures from the Colorado Division of Insurance, Coloradans pay more than $5.7 billion in premiums per year for health insurance. That’s a lot of money, yet these same insurance companies pay out ~86% of premium income to health care providers, while 16.7% of their revenues go toward administrative costs. That doesn’t leave much margin for profit; in fact, most recently the average provision for profit and contingencies amounted to -2.8% — that’s right, insurance companies lost money.

To be sure, a lot of us who have insurance think premium costs might be too high. Having said that, insurance companies have created co-pays and annual deductibles to keep premium prices from being even higher. But were a government to ban the imposition of co-pays and annual deductibles, particularly for expensive medical procedures that companies would be forced to cover, insurance companies would have little choice but to increase premiums. That is precisely what has happened in Colorado.

Last year’s House Bill 1309 was passed on a party-line vote and signed into law by the governor. The bill is a sop to the transgender community in that it calls mind and body altering ‘treatments’ like hormonal therapy and a dozen plastic surgery procedures “medically necessary”, then demands insurance companies pay for them with no co-pays, annual deductibles, or lifetime maximums — and no questions asked even when the patient is a minor. Ultimately, Colorado residents and taxpayers are forced to underwrite a mental illness (as the former head of Psychiatry at Johns-Hopkins Hospital characterized it. Prescriptions for treatment, under the terms of the bill, come from a “physical or behavioral health care provider”. So, a behavioral health provider can prescribe this “treatment” to a minor? Yep.

Hormonal treatments are not wildly expensive, but plastic surgery is, often running to the tens of thousands of dollars for various procedures, and there’s no limit on how many procedures a patient can undergo — all without paying a cent. Of course, those disfigured by cancer treatments that require plastic surgery receive no such care — it only goes to men that claim to be women (and vice-versa) in Colorado.

The same no co-pay, no deductible approach is also applied to a wider variety of medical procedures — including abortion — under the terms of Senate Bill 189 (passed in 2023). Under the circumstances, is it any wonder health care premiums in Colorado are going up?

Adding insult to injury, Senate Bill 215 (passed into law in 2020) assesses a fee on insurance providers and hospitals; the income from these fees (amounting to hundreds of dollars per policy and hundreds of millions of dollars over the past three years is then used by the state government to purchase private health insurance for people in the country illegally. When businesses like insurance companies are forced to pay new fees, what is the likelihood they turn around and add their costs to the premiums the public pays?

The Colorado legislature is back in session; no doubt we’ll talk about health care prices. But though businesses and individuals are forced to fork over more money for health care coverage this year, Democrats won’t be shocked — after all, they planned it. As for you the customer, you shouldn’t just be shocked — you should be outraged. And now you know whom to blame.

Brandi Bradley (R) represents House District 39. She lives in Lone Tree (Douglas County).