Legislative leaders gathered last week over eggs, bacon and orange juice to discuss issues of unique importance to older Coloradans and signaled they would work to extend a pilot program that allows property tax exemptions for senior citizens to be portable.
That program, authorized by a law enacted earlier this year, applies only to 2025 and 2026 property taxes.
“You should be able to move within the state of Colorado and maintain that exemption,” incoming Senate president James Coleman, D-Denver, said at a forum sponsored by AARP Colorado and ColoradoPolitics and held last week at the Warwick Denver Hotel.
The challenge, House speaker Julia McCluskie, D-Dillon, explained, will be the limits of the state budget. “We will continue to struggle with priorities,” she said. “This year we are a billion dollars short.”
A September report by the Colorado Legislative Council indicated that the state faces a $921.3 million fiscal hole next fiscal year.
Rep. Monica Duran, D-Wheat Ridge, and the House majority leader, said she is “open” to maintaining the portable property tax credit. So did minority leader Rose Pugliesi, R-Colorado Springs. “As we are addressing housing affordability and attainability, which we’ve been talking about as a state for many, many years, the senior homestead exemption portability is a critical part of being able to open up those homes and giving that opportunity for additional housing,” she said.
Participants also discussed a tax credit for paid family caregivers. That program, also enacted into law this year, applies to nurse aids, among other service providers, and is limited to $75,000 for a single taxpayer and $100,000 for a couple.
None of the panelists offered an unconditional endorsement of its extension, citing budget worries, but most did indicate support for trying to find a way to keep it on the books.
McCluskie said she “would support a tax credit in this space” and then proceeded to lay out the complexity involved.
“The dynamics, the demographic of our population is changing,” she explained. “We are an older, grayer Colorado and that change is creating really challenging pressures on our budget.”
The speaker, who will begin her last term in the House when the legislative session opens next month, mentioned that “expenditures on Medicaid for long term health care services, primarily for seniors, [were] the unpredicted, unanticipated $600 million increase in the budget this year.”
“How are we going to deal with that, moving forward? We are going to have to look at how we are going to provide a variety of additional health care services for our seniors moving forward.”
The Republican House caucus may be willing to cooperate in that effort, but may also be skeptical of the cost to the state. Pugliesi said the home care tax credit should be “part of our priorities.” But she went on to argue that “if we look at the amount of tax credits we have given out as a legislature in, especially this last legislative session, there is just not much more room left.”
“I just don’t know where the money comes from,” Pugliesi added.
Moderator Luige del Puerto, the editor of ColoradoPolitics, prompted the legislators to discuss how the General Assembly could combat financial crimes that target the elderly. Nationwide, financial frauds aimed at older Americans cost those over 60 years old at least $28 billion every year, according to a recent AARP report.
“I think there’s a special place in hell for scammers, del Puerto said. “They are increasingly becoming sophisticated.”
Coleman and assistant Senate minority leader Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, said the legislature would likely focus on increasing punitive consequences for scammers.
““We have to have measures in place to deter individuals who want to do this,” Coleman said. “Otherwise, they’re going to continue to do it.”
Simpson pointed out that consequences have to outweigh the potential ill-gotten gains. “When people get caught doing these scams, the consequences are going to have to be much greater than what they are right now.”
One challenge that elderly victims experience can be confusion when presented with online efforts to swindle them out of personal information, including credit card numbers, which can be used to drain their financial assets. Several studies have indicated that the elderly are more likely to be victimized by financial crimes than any other. And “[i]t may be particularly damaging for an older person to be a victim as they tend to be on fixed incomes,” concluded one 2014 paper. “There is also the risk of losing their independence if others notice they are not making safe financial decisions.”
Coleman emphasized the importance of education to help senior citizens avoid or defeat scam attempts. “There should be some kind of resource we can create where you, as a senior citizen, if you don’t have anyone, you can even reach out and say, ‘how do I validate whether or not this is legitimate?’,” he said.
The AARP’s ElderWatch provides such assistance. The University of Denver’s Paul Freeman Financial Security Program is developing a program in which financial institutions, non-profit organizations, and state agencies will work together to address the problem.
Pugliesi indicated that Republicans under the Gold Dome are not enthusiastic about enacting any new consumer protection statutes. “We’ve done a lot about consumer protection and deceptive trade practices already,” she said. “I do think we need to see what the impact of that legislation is and how it works in practice.”
Medicaid also became a subject of the panel’s focus, with McCluskie warning that the state faces a growing fiscal challenge relating to reimbursements to health care providers under that system.
“In some cases, we’re at 20% of benchmark when we are providing reimbursement to our Medicaid providers,” she said. “And that is simply unacceptable. We continue to hear from providers, particularly in rural Colorado, where our Medicaid and Medicare populations are so high, that they cannot afford to provide healthcare.”
“How are we going to continue to bear the burden of a Medicaid system that is growing at such exponential rates and deliver services for our most vulnerable Coloradans?,” McCluskie added.
Colorado’s Medicaid Provider Rate Review Advisory Committee recommended, for FY 2025, a reimbursement increase of almost $600 million. That suggestion contemplates the state paying $287 million and the federal government paying the remaining amount.
“Given our budget realities this year, it is likely that we will not see increases in the way we have in the past few years,” McCluskie said.
Project 2025, a set of policy recommendations provided by The Heritage Foundation to President-elect Donald Trump and which was developed by a number of the persons he has asked to serve in his second administration, includes a proposal to convert Medicaid to a system of block grants and impose time limits on coverage for Medicaid recipients.
“Under the current federal-state financial partnership, the federal government pays a fixed percentage of states’ Medicaid costs, whatever those costs are,” according to the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. “In contrast, under block grants and per capita caps, federal funding would be capped, with states receiving only a fixed amount of federal Medicaid funding either in the aggregate or on a per-beneficiary basis, irrespective of states’ actual costs.”
The suggested policy “would set time limits on Medicaid coverage and impose lifetime caps on benefits, which are now prohibited,” CCF continued. “It would also allow states to increase premiums and cost-sharing above current limits and to also presumably impose premiums and cost-sharing on beneficiaries like children and pregnant people who are now exempt.”
If enacted into law, these approaches could increase the state’s burden to provide healthcare coverage for low-income residents. The ideas are similar to several included in the Republican Study Committee roadmap for the fiscal year 2025 federal budget.