Health care in southwest Colorado is in danger because of the coming impacts of H.R. 1. That was the message given by State Rep. Katie Stewart, Southwest Health System CEO Joe Theine, and others during a virtual press conference Tuesday morning.
The conference was organized by Protect Our Care, a nonprofit focused on health-care issues.
The Trump administration recently announced that nearly $170 million is coming to rural Colorado from the Rural Health Transformation Program. Theine said SHS will get $1.1 million from that fund, which is helpful, but it won’t alleviate the long-term effects of HR 1. Those cuts to Medicaid and to tax credits for the Affordable Care Act are expected to mean an average reduction of $9.6 million in revenues annually for SHS by 2033, according to an analysis by an outside firm.
H.R. 1, which was passed in 2025 and is known as the Big Beautiful Bill, cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Cortez’s Southwest Memorial Hospital, a 20-bed critical access hospital, is one of seven health-care providers in the congressional district represented by Congressman Jeff Hurd listed by Protect Our Care as in danger of closing or reducing services.
Theine said the hospital serves not only people in the local community, but people traveling through the area. Recently, he said, a visitor from California fell and needed emergency and hospitalized care, “and we were able to be that place for them.”
The hospital has had a modest operating income of $1 million to $2 million in the last two years, Theine said, following several years when it showed a loss. If it continues to have such an operating income, it won’t be able to function after all the changes made by H.R. 1 kick in. Many of them do not take effect until after this year.
“if nothing changes, a hospital like ours cannot operate in perpetuity with a $7 million-a-year operating loss,” Theine said. “Those one time funds coming in through the Rural Health Transformation Program, while they are helpful and meaningful, really don’t fill the hole that H.R. 1 is going to leave in terms of loss of coverage for people and loss of payments to providers.”
Stewart, who represents four counties, including most of Montezuma County, in the state legislature, said her district has a higher proportion of people on Medicare and Medicaid.
She said the funds from the Rural Health Transformation Program represent only about a third of what is needed to keep local hospitals open.
“There are only so many things you can do to Band-Aid the issue before it hemorrhages,” Stewart said, “and that’s what the Rural Health Transformation Program is, a bandage for a hemorrhage. Colorado deserves better and America deserves better.”
Thomas J. Buckley, a patient and health-care advocate in the Pueblo area, said that a year ago, he knew little about health care. Then, after taking a routine blood test, he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer at the age of 31.
This will require him to have treatment for the remainder of his life, Buckley said.
“Treatment wasn’t optional, surgery wasn’t optional, weekly appointments weren’t optional, the only question was, how was I going to pay for it?” he said
“I received news of my diagnosis 12 hours before the government shut down, 12 hours before learning I would need lifelong treatment, 12 hours before I understood the stability of my health coverage and the future of the health-care system I would depend on for the remainder of my life were all suddenly in question,” Buckley said.
He was on insurance through the Affordable Care Act, but because of H.R.1 eliminating the tax credits for the ACA, his premium would increase from $30.41 to $543.81 per month, he said, “not gradually, but immediately.”
The only way he could afford continued treatment was by going on Medicaid, which required him to limit his income and take an indefinite leave of absence from a company he genuinely liked.
“Health care isn’t one decision, it’s thousands of decisions made over the years, and every one of those decisions reaches someone’s waiting room,” Buckley said.
“Chronic illness turned me into an advocate.”
Now, he said, health-care providers have to confront difficult choices over which services they can continue to provide or whether they can continue to provide care at all.
“We were told it’s a big beautiful bill. We were sold a big bag of b.s. We used to have two categories of health care – inpatient and outpatient. This creates a third – the out-of-luck patient.”
Karen Zink, a nurse practitioner and owner of Southwest Women’s Health Associates in Durango, said in the Third Congressional District, which Hurd represents, there were 228,019 people on Medicaid at the time of the passage of H.R. 1, which Hurd supported. Many of them are now coming off Medicaid.
The non-renewal of the Affordable Care Act tax credits is also causing problems, Zink said. She spoke about a Durango couple whose plan cost $600 a month and now costs $2,600 a month.
“We need to examine our priorities in this country,” Zink said. “We have a major problem with health care.”
