The percentage of Coloradans who said they struggled to afford housing and rent has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels after temporary support expired, while the share reporting mental health challenges has continued to rise.
One bright spot in the newly released Colorado Health Access Survey, which collected responses from about 10,000 randomly selected households, was that the uninsured rate fell to a new low of 4.6% in 2023.
But that number may not reflect the current situation, since the surveys came in between March and September, and included only a few months when the state was removing residents from Medicaid, said Sara Schmitt, president and CEO of the Colorado Health Institute.
During the COVID-19 public health emergency, states couldn’t remove most people from their Medicaid rolls, but that protection ended in early 2023. Colorado started removing residents in May if the state Medicaid program couldn’t verify their eligibility and they didn’t return paperwork proving they qualified.
“We don’t know how many Coloradans who were on Medicaid have found other coverage,” Schmitt said during a press briefing Wednesday. “Some may have lost coverage.”
The loss of pandemic protections already showed up in some areas, though.
The percentage of people who reported they worried they wouldn’t have a stable place to live in the next two months rebounded to roughly the same level as in 2019, with 16.9% of renters and 2.4% of homeowners expressing that concern. The percentage of renters who said they were worried was up by more than one-third compared to 2021, when the country was under an eviction moratorium for the first half of the year.
Food insecurity, which the survey defined as eating less than a person thought they should because they couldn’t afford food, was higher than before the pandemic, with 11.2% of respondents saying they experienced it. In 2021, the food insecurity rate dropped to about 8.1%, partially due to a temporary increase in food assistance dollars, Schmitt said. The return to normal levels of assistance, plus the rise in grocery prices, pushed more people’s budgets to the brink, she said.
Coloradans’ mental health also was worse than before the pandemic, with 26.2% reporting they had poor mental health on eight or more days in the previous month, said Lindsey Whittington, data and analysis manager at the Colorado Health Institute.
The economic and psychological trends may be related, since poor mental health was most common in adults under 50, they said.
“We saw that mental health challenges didn’t go away as the pandemic eased,” Whittington said. “We know there have been many financial and social stressors impacting adults.”
While most of the news from the 2023 report wasn’t good, it did show that some of the actions Colorado and the federal government took to help families stay financially afloat during the pandemic succeeded in reducing the effects of poverty, like food and housing insecurity, Whittington said.
“We know that policy works,” they said.
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