Colorado health care providers said Wednesday that federal cuts to Medicaid being weighed by Republicans in Congress would drastically impair their ability to provide services to patients and keep their doors open.

At a news conference alongside U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat, leaders with Denver Health, Tepeyac Community Health Center and the Colorado Hospital Association said Medicaid cuts would lead to reduced services, layoffs and even facility closures around the state.

Republican budget proposals in Congress could roll back how much money the federal government provides to match states for Medicaid, a joint health care program for people with low incomes or disabilities that covers 1 in 5 people living in the U.S.

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Donna Lynne, CEO of Denver Health, said the public health care provider could lose up to $1 billion of its $1.5 billion budget if Medicaid funding dwindles.

“We can’t afford to do that,” Lynne said. “We’d have to cut services. We’d have to lay off employees, and the impact, not just in Denver but in the entire state, it’s catastrophic.”

Lynne said Denver Health would also have to scale back biomedical research efforts.

Jeff Tieman, CEO of the Colorado Hospital Association, said 70 percent of the hospitals in Colorado are already operating with very small or negative margins. He said cuts to Medicaid would result in patients losing coverage and access to health care, shuttering of services and even certain hospitals, and a “diminished” provider community. Medicaid funding losses would disproportionately harm small and rural hospitals, he said.

“Medicaid is a lifeline, and it is crucial to the success, frankly, of our entire state,” Tieman said.

DeGette said during Trump’s first term in 2017, Medicaid cuts were proposed, and the “outpouring of opposition from Americans was so great” that those proposals were tabled. She said public support for Medicaid has grown since then, citing a KFF poll that found 77 percent of Americans support Medicaid ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

“The Trump administration has caused chaos and confusion for patients all across the country,” she said at her Denver office Wednesday. “Frankly, these cuts would impact millions of Americans, thousands of people in my congressional district in order to pay for a huge tax cut for billionaires.”

DeGette, the ranking Democrat on the health subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said she and other Democrats will oppose “draconian” cuts to health care coverage that negatively affect their constituents.

With Colorado anticipating a tight state budget in the coming years, DeGette said the state would not be able to make up for Medicaid funding that could be lost at the federal level.

“Colorado’s already going to be struggling in the next budget cycle to be able to even pay for what they’re paying for now,” she said.

Jim Garcia, CEO at Tepeyac Community Health Center, said Tepeyac has the highest percentage of uninsured patients among community health centers, as well as the lowest percentage of Medicaid patients.

He said Medicaid represents about 10 percent of the center’s revenue and is essential to ensuring it is able to offer integrated care, meaning patients can access medical, mental health and dental care at the same place. Medicaid cuts would lead to patients delaying or foregoing care, he said, which could lead to higher costing emergency hospital visits.

“This would be a devastating impact on our already lean budget and would require us to contract our services and limit the care we are able to provide to our patients,” Garcia said.

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