Latest news with #GabeEvans
Miami Herald
10 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Colorado Treasurer Dave Young launches bid for hotly contested 8th Congressional District
DENVER - Colorado Treasurer Dave Young is joining the increasingly crowded Democratic primary for the 8th Congressional District. Young, a Greeley Democrat, is a former member of the state legislature and its powerful Joint Budget Committee. He points to his deep roots in the district and five successful races - three specifically in the 8th District and two statewide - as evidence he'll be able to flip the highly competitive seat blue once again in next year's election. U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Republican, won the seat in 2024 after defeating freshman Democrat Yadira Caraveo. She was the first to represent the new seat, which was created after the 2020 census and stretches from Thornton to Greeley. Fewer than 2,500 votes have decided the victor in both elections for the seat. The 2026 race is likely to be just as close. Three other Democrats have declared for it so far: Caraveo and state Reps. Shannon Bird and Manny Rutinel. The primary election will be next summer. Young, who has served as state treasurer since 2019 and is term-limited in 2026, said in an interview ahead of his Wednesday morning announcement that he was motivated to seek office once more by Evans' recent yes vote on the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the sweeping Republican spending and tax cut package supported by President Donald Trump. In particular, Young is worried about proposed cuts to Medicaid in the bill. Evans, for his part, has argued that the bill has been the subject of "blatant fearmongering." Young's sister has severe developmental disabilities and behavioral health issues, he said, and cuts to Medicaid two decades ago left her homeless. Cuts then spurred him to seek office in 2011, when he was appointed to the Colorado House of Representatives, and they're spurring him now, Young said. "I know I can compete and win races, and I know I can win this one," Young said. "We've got to get Gabe Evans out of there, and people need to know that the services they depend on are going to be sustained and improved so they can move their lives forward." Young said he plans to run on "kitchen table economic issues" and on his experience. He pointed to a bill he ran to reform the state Medicaid program as a lawmaker and to his administration as treasurer of the small business CLIMBER loan fund and the unclaimed property trust fund. He wants Congress to wrest back balance as a co-equal branch of government to the White House. "Congress right now is giving away their power and authority," Young said. "… We see it play out in tariffs right now, where the administration has far exceeded its authority and created economic ripples, but you also see it where they're reluctant to push back on things like what Gave Evans voted on." -------------- Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
CBS News
6 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
In Colorado, protesters try to disrupt Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert press conference meant to celebrate Republican budget bill
Republicans met with protesters as they hold press conference in Colorado about budget bill Republicans met with protesters as they hold press conference in Colorado about budget bill Republicans met with protesters as they hold press conference in Colorado about budget bill Hecklers in Denver on Thursday crashed a press conference hosted by Republicans Rep. Gabe Evans and Rep. Lauren Boebert and accused them of cutting health care for the poor to finance tax breaks for the rich. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican who represents Colorado's 4th Congressional District, speaks at a press conference addressing President Trump's budget bill outside the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on May 29, 2025. Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images Evans, who represents Colorado's 8th Congressional District, and Boebert, who represents Colorado's 4th Congressional District, say they have what President Trump calls the One Big Beautiful Bill Act all wrong. "It's about cutting wasteful spending, the waste, the fraud, the abuse," says Boebert. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will save $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years -- most of those savings from changes to Medicaid. While Democrats say the changes will hurt the most vulnerable, Republicans say they will help the vulnerable by keeping Medicaid sustainable long-term. Protesters tried to disrupt a press conference addressing President Trump's budget bill at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on May 29, 2025. Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images Evans say the people who will lose Medicaid coverage under the bill should have never had it in the first place. "With these reforms, we protect the program for the people who need it most by disenrolling illegal immigrants, by disenrolling people who are ineligible for the program," Evans said. The bill requires twice yearly eligibility checks, cuts funding to states like Colorado that cover undocumented immigrants, and requires those without disabilities or dependents to work, volunteer or go to school part-time. Gov. Jared Polis and Democratic legislators say between 140,000 and 230,000 Coloradans could lose coverage because of the bill. Rep. Jason Crow says the uninsured will end up in emergency rooms, driving up uncompensated care and increasing health care premiums for everyone. "You can't take a trillion dollars out of the U.S. health care system without that sending shockwaves through the entire system," said Crow, a Democrat who represents Colorado's 6th Congressional District. The bill also makes changes to the tax code. It doubles the standard deduction, increases the child tax credit, eliminates the tax on tips and overtime, and lowers the tax on small businesses. "It protects working class Americans by giving tax breaks that benefit the bottom 85% of wage earners in Colorado," said Evans. Crow says higher wage earners will see the biggest break. "They're going to cut these programs that are actually going to cost us more. They're going to add over $3 trillion to the deficit and they're going to do it in the name of trickle-down economics which has never shown to work," he said. Evans says Democrats are fear mongering. "At the end of the day, the American people are sick and tired of the political screaming without any actual conversation or dialogue," Evans said. In addition to Medicaid and tax reform, the bill also increases funding for border security and cuts funding for food stamps and clean energy programs. The Congressional Budget Office says despite $1.5 trillion in savings, the measure will raise the national debt by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade. The federal government is on track to spend $85 trillion between now and 2034. The bill still needs to pass the Senate where it will almost certainly undergo changes.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Republicans defend spending bill, which could strip Medicaid from 200K Coloradans
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 May 29, 2025. (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.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX '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 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.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
CBS News
6 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Protesters rally at Colorado Republican press conference, shout over representatives
Protesters showed up at a Republican event to discuss the budget bill in downtown Denver on Thursday, shouting over the speakers. As protesters overshadowed the discussion about what is known as the "one big, beautiful bill," Colorado Representatives Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert met with reporters outside the State Capitol to discuss the spending bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a single vote. Republican Representatives Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert hold a press conference at the Capitol CBS They called it a win for our way of life and said any cuts to Medicaid would only impact Coloradans who shouldn't be getting the benefits. "And this one big, beautiful bill actually protects Medicaid by getting 1.4 million illegal immigrants off of the Medicaid rolls, by getting 1.2 million people who are not eligible for Medicaid benefits off of the Medicaid rolls, and preserving the program for the people who need it most," said Evans. CBS Boebert asserted, "It's about cutting wasteful spending; the waste, the fraud, the abuse, the illegal aliens who are receiving taxpayer benefits. This is going to stop with the one big, beautiful bill. Besides changing Medicaid, the bill would make income tax cuts passed during President Trump's first term permanent. It would phase out Biden Era clean energy tax credits, fund border security, and restrict food stamps. The bill is more than a thousand pages. A nonpartisan committee estimated the House spending package at nearly $4 trillion.
CBS News
6 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Sen. Michael Bennet returns to Colorado, listens to patients describe Medicaid impact amid possible cuts
Sen. Michael Bennet returned to Colorado this week and listened to patients describe the impact Medicaid has made on them and their families. The Democrat representing Colorado listened to their stories as the federal program faces potential funding cuts. Bennet appeared on the panel with Denver Health CEO Donna Lynne as part of a national conversation about how Medicaid coverage may change in the future. Sen. Michael Bennet sits on a panel listening to Medicaid patients. CBS Bennet listened to patients and doctors describe their experiences with using Medicaid and also how frustrating it can be for older patients to navigate the system. "The doctors at the hospital, they were so helpful, and they told me what I needed to do and they helped me get enrolled in Medicaid. And it was a Godsend because I wouldn't even be here today if I didn't have Medicaid," said one woman who was a patient at Denver Health. One provision in the bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, would require some eligible Medicaid patients to return to work if they are capable. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Republican representing Colorado's 8th Congressional District, is on the Energy and Commerce Committee and voted for the bill that he claims will protect Medicaid for those who need it by purging those who aren't eligible. Lynne said Denver Health sees 125,000 patients a year who are on Medicaid. A total of 10% of the patients on Medicaid in Colorado go to Denver Health for treatment and two-thirds of the funding comes from the federal government.
