Every Thursday, KUNC's Samantha Coetzee speaks with our colleagues over at the Colorado Sun about the local stories they're following.
Today she spoke with environment writer Michael Booth about insurance price increases, PFAS regulations, and how changes to Medicaid are affecting mental health care providers.
Interview Highlights:
These interview highlights have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Samantha Coetzee: Just to start off, it looks like some health insurance prices are set to go up next year. What do Coloradans need to know?
Michael Booth: It used to be that the annual jump in our health insurance rates was one of the hottest stories every year. The fact that it's a big increase in a big story again this year reminds us that things have been relatively calm lately. Remember, it seemed like we were fighting about dismantling Obamacare altogether about every six months.
We've had a few years of not-so-shocking health insurance increases for people or small groups who buy policies on their own. Now that group of buyers will see their rates jump 11% next year, on average, its largest jump in five years. It will be a lot worse if Colorado didn't have a reinsurance program that helps the insurance companies absorb big losses and keep things somewhat affordable for everyone else.
But the news gets worse if you are off the highly populated front-range corridor. If you're on the western slope or Eastern Plains and buying these plans on the state exchange, your price hikes are more like 20%. About 8% of the state buys their health insurance this way. So it's a couple hundred thousand people we're talking about. State officials were much happier to announce that the Colorado option is on course for next year and that the rates for that publicly mandated choice are looking fairly good.
Coetzee: The EPA just released new guidelines on how much PFAS, or forever chemicals, can be in drinking water. These new numbers put Frisco and a bunch of other Colorado cities high above the limit. Can you talk about what's changed and how it affects residents?
Booth: We've been talking about all the new ways the forever chemicals are becoming big problems in Colorado. Unfortunately, we've uncovered a few more. The EPA and scientists have known for a long time that some levels in drinking water is dangerous to human health. The argument has always been about how much is too much. For a long time, the EPA set a guideline for drinking water that should be no more than 70 parts per trillion.
Frisco is among the Colorado towns that use state testing and thought they were pretty safe at about 11 parts per trillion. But then in June, the EPA moved the goalpost so far back, it's like we're in a different stadium entirely. They said their new guidelines would be down to 0.004 parts per trillion, for one example. Suddenly Frisco finds itself in a thousand times that.
So they quickly started diluting their one bad well with three other sources, which is common when towns face fast problems. And then they brought a water treatment plant back online and shut down the other well altogether. Our reporting found more than 100 cities and towns in Colorado now are facing the same problem. They have test results showing them over the guidelines and they now need to work with the state to retest and start building treatment plants.
Coetzee: There are updates to Medicaid that are really hindering things for private mental health professionals. Can you tell us more about that?
Booth: Jennifer Brown has been on the story for months now and the state Medicaid system just can't seem to work out its problems with the mental health providers who it desperately needs right now. The problems are all about signing up to get paid by the state. When you're a counselor who has provided services and then getting them to actually pay you, the state goes through regional agencies to administer these programs. They wanted to have more consistent rules on how much training and licensure you needed before you could qualify.
Now the state has surprised dozens of would-be counselors with new rules. Interns and graduate students who do not yet have a full state license need to be closely supervised by licensed counselors if their therapy gets paid for. Now, those supervisors need to have been licensed for longer before they can sign off.
This will make it harder for hundreds of patients to carry through with their appointments. Meanwhile, demand for mental health services on Medicaid only gets higher as the state system now serves more than 1.4 million people. The state really can't afford to lose more therapists. Mental health counselors argue the state officials should be making their work easier, not harder.
