Evans, Boebert defend Medicaid cuts as protesters shout them down in Denver

Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton, center, spoke about the GOP’s budget bill in a press conference at the Colorado State Capitol on Thursday (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline).

Speaking over heckling chants from a nearby crowd of protesters, two of Colorado’s top Republicans stood outside the state Capitol on Thursday, defending their party’s sweeping federal budget bill in a press conference that leaned heavily on a series of misleading claims about Medicaid and immigration.

U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert of Windsor and Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton were among the 215 House Republicans who voted last week to approve the bill, which includes many of President Donald Trump’s key domestic policy priorities. Despite deep cuts to social programs, headlined by the largest-ever reduction in Medicaid spending, the bill’s tax cuts and new funding for the military and border security mean it would add an estimated $2.3 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years.

“This is a victory for our values, for our communities and for our American way of life,” Boebert told reporters. “It’s about cutting wasteful spending — the waste, the fraud, the abuse, the illegal aliens who are receiving taxpayer benefits.”

“We are protecting Medicaid for the people that need it most,” Evans said. “We are removing 1.4 million illegal immigrants from the taxpayer-funded rolls of Medicaid.”

Immigrants in the U.S. unlawfully are not eligible for federal Medicaid benefits. Republicans’ budget bill would enact multibillion-dollar penalties for 14 states, including Colorado, that choose to cover some undocumented immigrants using state funds. But regardless of how states respond to those new rules, the vast majority of the funding cuts and insurance coverage losses projected to result from the bill will fall on citizens and lawful residents.

Under a program that went into effect this year, income-eligible pregnant people and children can receive some benefits from Colorado’s state-administered Medicaid program regardless of their immigration status. The state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing estimates the program will cover about 15,000 undocumented individuals in 2025, at a cost of $50.8 million.

Those figures represent a small fraction of the annual loss of roughly $1 billion the state faces under the GOP bill’s Medicaid changes, and of the 124,000 to 207,000 current enrollees who are projected to lose coverage, according to the nonprofit KFF. Most of the coverage losses would result from the bill’s rollback of Biden-era rules aimed at streamlining enrollment and renewal, and enactment of new obstacles in the form of more frequent eligibility checks and work requirements for able-bodied adults without children.

Many health care advocates say those new hurdles will tie up Medicaid programs in red tape and deny coverage to millions of eligible Americans. Nearly two-thirds of Medicaid recipients are already employed, and nearly all the rest are caregivers, students and people with disabilities. Studies have shown that state-level Medicaid work requirements, like one enacted in Arkansas, result in substantial losses of coverage and higher administrative costs, but no change in the rate of employment.

“Without Medicaid, people die,” Sara Loflin, executive director of the advocacy group ProgressNow Colorado, said in a statement Thursday. “Evans wants voters to believe that the people who will lose coverage don’t deserve health care, but thousands of Coloradans will fall through the cracks, and some of them will die as a result of Evans’ vote.”

Evans in the spotlight

Evans and Boebert were joined at Thursday’s press conference by GOP state Sen. Byron Pelton of Sterling, Rep. Carlos Barron of Fort Lupton and Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams. The group spoke for about 45 minutes as a few dozen activists from ProgressNow and other left-leaning groups, separated from the press conference by a few yards and a loose cordon of Colorado State Patrol officers, shouted in protest — especially of Evans, the first-term representative from Colorado’s battleground 8th Congressional District.

Despite representing one of the nation’s most evenly divided districts, Evans, a former state lawmaker who won his seat by fewer than 2,500 votes last year, has done little to distance himself from Trump or House Republican leadership during his first five months in Congress. Demonstrators chanted and held signs urging Evans to hold in-person town hall events to hear from his constituents, something he has so far refused to do.

“It’s really unfortunate, as a mother of four boys and a grandmother, that I see more order in my home with children than I do with radical leftists,” Boebert said of the demonstrators. “We want to have a conversation. We want to be able to answer questions, but the tolerant left doesn’t seem very tolerant.”

Evans, noting that projected Medicaid spending would still see year-over-year increases under the GOP plan, at one point claimed flatly that “Medicaid is not being cut,” eliciting howls of derision from the protesters.

At nearly 10% of total projected spending, the bill’s $625 billion in total cuts to Medicaid spending over the next decade would be the largest reduction in the program’s 50-year history. Nationwide, a total of 10.3 million people would lose access to Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Asked repeatedly how many of his constituents, nearly 1 in 3 of whom are enrolled in Medicaid, would become uninsured under the GOP plan, Evans did not answer, and instead twice recited the “categories of people who lose coverage.” Statewide, Colorado Medicaid enrollment would shrink by between 11% and 18%, according to KFF.

“Do you not know the number?” asked a reporter.

“I’m telling you the number right now,” said Evans, who did not say a number. “You may not like the answer, but that’s the answer. Next question.”

Republicans in the U.S. Senate are expected to pass their own budget reconciliation bill that differs significantly from the House’s version, a process that could extend well into the summer. Alongside the Medicaid cuts, other key components of the bill include extensions of broad-based income and business tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, and hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding for border security, law enforcement and the military.

Evans said claims that the bill amounted to “taking from the poor and giving to the rich” were “patently false.” But the benefits of the GOP plan’s tax cuts are heavily skewed towards people with higher incomes: The top 1% of earners would see their after-tax incomes rise by over 4%, while incomes for the bottom 20% of earners would rise by just 0.6%, or an average of $90 a year, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The nonpartisan CBO found those meager tax savings for low-income people would be more than offset by the bill’s cuts to Medicaid and other social programs, causing household resources for the lowest income decile to drop 4% by 2033 while rising for higher-income households.

“When you see your bill getting more and more unpopular as people learn the truth about it, you lie more,” said Wynn Howell, state director of the Colorado Working Families Party, after Thursday’s press conference. “When all you have is lies and scapegoats, you have a problem with your bill.”

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.