Colorado Director of Medicaid agency to resign

Kim Bimestefer, the longtime head of the Colorado agency that oversees Medicaid, announced Monday that she will resign next week, days after lawmakers told Gov. Jared Polis’ staff that they planned to introduce a resolution calling for her removal.

Bimestefer has overseen the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, or HCPF, since January 2018, when she took the job under then-Gov. John Hickenlooper. The agency’s longest-serving leader, she is set to leave the role on April 10.

She led the agency through the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic and as it weathered recent controversies, including program overpayments and allegations of massive fraud in a transportation program.

Problems within the agency — and criticisms of Bimestefer — have mounted, particularly as lawmakers have debated how best to fill a $1.5 billion budget shortfall this year and handle Medicaid’s ever-increasing costs. HCPF’s total budget last year was $18 billion, with $4.2 billion of that coming from the state’s general fund. As of May 2025, more than 1.1 million adults and children were covered by Medicald in Colorado, according to KFF.

A group of state senators began drafting a resolution of no confidence in Bimestefer after several Medicaid billing problems came to light in recent weeks. The agency was significantly overpaying providers in its Medicaid transportation service for several years to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — an error missed by state officials even as they conducted an extensive review of the same program because it was riddled with fraud.

Twenty-eight senators — a majority of the chamber’s 35 members — had signed on to the resolution calling for Polis to remove

Bimestefer from her post, said Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat.

Mullica said the resolution listed the transportation billing errors as well as potential overpayments for autism care that totaled $75 million and have drawn federal scrutiny. It also noted that more than 500,000 people lost Medicaid coverage during the post-pandemic Medicaid “unwind,” as temporary eligibility expansions expired.

He said he presented the resolution to Polis’ staff last week, and lawmakers had planned to introduce it either Monday or “in the very near future.”

HCPF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the resolution. A spokesman for Polis said he would check to see if the governor’s office had additional comment beyond its initial announcement about Bimestefer’s departure.

Through a spokesman, Bimestefer declined an earlier interview request Monday. Her compensation last year was $228,706, according to OpenBooks.

In a statement put out by Polis’ office, Bimestefer said she had “the privilege of advancing systems that help Coloradans — often in the most difficult times in their lives — get the care and support they need to rise and thrive.”

“Working alongside HCPF leaders, staff and stakeholders, we have navigated one unprecedented challenge after another for over eight years to protect the state’s most vulnerable, with this current chapter proving to be incredibly difficult,” she wrote.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, were more critical of her tenure. Mullica said it had been difficult to grapple with the painful Medicaid cuts contemplated this year alongside apparent mistakes from HCPF.

Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican who sits on the powerful Joint Budget Committee, said Bimestefer should’ve left long ago and that her departure “marks the end of a failed era for this department.”

Bimestefer’s time overseeing HCPF included the entirety of the pandemic, which hit the U.S. in 2020 and saw the rapid expansion of Medicaid to include a broader swath of the population. The program has been expanded in other ways at the direction of lawmakers, and it has weathered similar rapid increases that plagued other Medicaid programs nationwide.

She also oversaw the pandemic unwind in the years since.

“In her tenure, Colorado has taken major steps to increase price transparency, reduce hospital and prescription drug costs, and hold the health care industry accountable,” Polis said in a statement. “Her legacy is one we hope to build on moving forward, and know that she will continue having an important impact on health care and serving her state in her next chapter.”

At a signing ceremony for an unrelated bill on Monday afternoon, Polis did not take questions from reporters.

Bimestefer’s departure comes as cash-strapped lawmakers grapple with a yawning hole in the state budget that’s been partially fueled by increases in Medicaid spending. Lawmakers this year are discussing how to cut Medicaid to make up for the gap, and they’ve told reporters that they want a deeper analysis of how Medicaid, and HCPF, is operated.

Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who also serves on the budget committee, called Bimestefer’s resignation a good first step to righting the beleaguered agency. She said she had lost trust that she was receiving accurate information from the department and its operations.

The lack of transparency, she said — combined with the series of multimillion-dollar scandals — ends up hitting families and people who rely on the life-and-death service that HCPF oversees.

“This is not a small thing,” Amabile said. She pointed to the department’s overpayment for extra-large wheelchair transportation, which may have cost the state upwards of $100 million. “And it’s coming now at the cost to families and patients.”

Lawmakers’ desire for additional oversight, along with lawmakers’ call for Bimestefer to be removed, comes after the legislature learned that HCPF serially overpaid for services in the Medicaid transportation program. At one point earlier this year, the state was paying 10 times what it should’ve been for the wheelchair transports.

The broader transportation program was also plagued with allegations of fraud in 2023 — shortly after HCPF, relying on an apparently faulty analysis, recommended a significant increase in reimbursement rates in that service. After that change was made, costs to the program exploded from $70 million to more than $300 million, and the error was not corrected until last summer.

Those problems, along with the potential autism overpayments, have drawn the scrutiny of federal regulators and Republicans in Congress, who sent a letter to state officials asking for more information about how the state detects and limits fraud.

Mullica says Bimestefer’s departure will give lawmakers and the state a fresh start.

“It allows us to really move on from (those issues) and start having conversations of what a sustainable Medicaid program is going to look like,” he said. “That’s really important, and I think it’s been hard with a lot of the mistakes that we’ve talked about that have happened in that department, with (Bimestefer) at the helm. Now we’re able to move past that, hopefully.”

In a statement, the Colorado Hospital Association said it hoped for a more collaborative HCPF going forward.

“Looking ahead, we urge legislative leaders to seek input from a broad coalition of patients, providers, advocates, payers and policymakers,” wrote Jeff Tieman, the group’s president and CEO. “Together, we can suggest paths forward to stabilize Medicaid and HCPF, strengthen our workforce, and make Colorado a national leader in smart, people-centered health care. That long-term, collaborative work must be a top priority for the legislature and for the current and incoming administrations.”