State Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton participates in an 8th District Republican primary debate at the Grizzly Rose in Denver on June 1, 2024. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)
Evasion often appears to be Gabe Evans’ primary skill. The new member of Congress from the Colorado district north of Denver has a demonstrated ability to avoid questions on important topics.
But votes provide clarity.
On Tuesday, Evans supported a federal budget plan that would slash health care funds for low-income Americans to help subsidize tax cuts for rich people. In the run-up to the vote, Evans said little about his intentions, even as public fears about the budget plan’s Medicaid cuts grew. But now we know. Evans, as his vote for the plan signifies, is aligned with the Trump administration’s cruel disregard for the well-being of the country’s most vulnerable residents.
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Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, provide safety-net health insurance to about 80 million people, including about 1.3 million Coloradans, or more than one-fifth of the state’s population.
“You can’t cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid without taking healthcare away from millions of seniors living in long-term care, children, and people with disabilities,” Adam Fox, deputy director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said in a statement. “Rushing these cuts will hurt those who can least afford care — and won’t do anything to lower our healthcare costs for the average Colorado family.”
The federal government and states share Medicaid costs. But Colorado is hardly in a position to backfill lost federal funding. Medicaid accounts for about one-third of Colorado’s general fund spending, and state lawmakers this year, facing a budget gap of about $1 billion, were already struggling to sustain Colorado’s Medicaid share.
U.S. House Republicans earlier this month proposed a sweeping budget resolution that would extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and boost border security and defense spending. Those tax cuts favor billionaires — a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis found that households in the top 1% by income enjoyed triple the tax cuts’ value compared with people in the bottom 60%. As if to underline the insult, the budget resolution would mean elimination of $880 billion over 10 years in health care spending for the country’s least affluent people.
That’s what Evans voted for this week.
He now claims that cuts to Medicaid would not affect “benefits” and would target only “waste, fraud and abuse.” But this argument is implausible. He has not specified instances of waste, fraud or abuse in Medicaid spending. And even if he had, if that were the true target of cuts, one would expect Republicans to propose a cut equal to the total of wasteful spending they’ve identified, rather than a sum determined by their other actual priorities, such as tax breaks for their rich friends.
Evans was not the only House member from Colorado who voted for the budget resolution. Every Republican in the state’s delegation — Lauren Boebert of Windsor, Jeff Crank of Colorado Springs, and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction — also voted for the measure.
But Evans’ vote deserves special scrutiny. He is a freshman who in November flipped Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, Colorado’s only truly competitive district and one of a handful of swing districts in the country. Democrats already see him as vulnerable in 2026, and the budget resolution vote will only add to their confidence they can reclaim the seat.
More importantly, about 163,000 of his constituents are covered by Colorado’s Medicaid or CHIP programs. That’s the most in any Colorado congressional district except the 3rd (also represented by a Republican, Hurd). If the Medicaid cuts gain final approval, tens of thousands of his constituents could find themselves unable to access critical care.
Since he was elected to Congress, Evans has dodged questions on various topics of importance to Coloradans, such as Trump’s plan to undertake the largest mass deportation in American history, and the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.
He also avoided questions about cuts to Medicaid. But now his position is clear: He would cut health care for thousands of Coloradans he purports to represent.
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