Rate of people in Colorado without health insurance holds steady, despite massive Medicaid drop

The percentage of people without health insurance has held steady in Colorado over the last couple of years despite hundreds of thousands of people being disenrolled from Medicaid at the end of the COVID pandemic, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

The latest edition of the Colorado Health Access Survey puts the state's uninsured rate at 5.9%.

That, by sheer numbers, is an increase from the last edition of the survey in 2023, when the uninsured rate was a record-low 4.6%. But Suman Mathur, a director at the Colorado Health Institute, which conducts the survey, said the change is not statistically significant, meaning that the data isn't precise enough to distinguish the two.

"Statistically speaking, the uninsured rate hasn't shifted much in recent years," she said.

That will come as welcome news to state health officials, who had long worried how the Medicaid disenrollments would impact the Colorado health care system. Rising numbers of uninsured people showing up for medical care at clinics have also raised alarms and strained the health care safety net.

The survey, which was conducted between January and July this year sampled more than 10,000 people by phone and online, in both English and Spanish. The results were weighted to account for the overall demographics of the state.

Where people dropped from Medicaid went

Medicaid enrollment swelled in Colorado during the COVID pandemic due to federal rules prohibiting states from dropping anyone from Medicaid while a federal public health emergency was declared. When that emergency status ended in 2023 and the state resumed regular eligibility checks, Colorado saw one of the steepest enrollment declines in the nation.

Nearly 1.8 million people were enrolled in Medicaid in Colorado in March 2023, according to numbers from the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which administers Medicaid. By May 2024, the number had dropped to nearly 1.2 million — a more than 600,000-person drop-off that amounted to a 34% decline in enrollment.

Enrollment has increased since then to about 1.2 million people as of October.

Matching this drop-off, this year's Colorado Health Access Survey does show a decline in the percentage of Coloradans covered by Medicaid — to 21% compared with 30% in 2023. The biggest area of coverage growth came in the percentage of people covered through private, employer-sponsored plans, which increased to 53% in 2025 compared with 49.4% in 2023.

The percentage of people on Medicare also increased, to 12.3% from 10.5%. That increase could be due to an aging population, but it also could be due to people who were previously covered by both Medicare and Medicaid moving fully into the Medicare column.

Other concerns

The survey also offered plenty to be concerned about.

Even among those who had insurance, between 20% and 25% of people said they could not afford the medical care or prescriptions that they needed. More than 10% of Coloradans said they ate less last year than they thought they should because they could not afford food. And more than 11% reported difficulty being able to afford their housing payments — with renters hit especially hard.

More than 20% of Coloradans reported experiencing eight or more days of poor mental health in the past month, but that was actually a bright spot for the survey — the number in 2023 was 26.1%, with people ages 30 through 64 especially seeing statistically significant improvements in their mental health.

The years during the COVID pandemic saw a marked worsening in mental health in Colorado. The years prior to the pandemic generally saw between 10% and 15% of Coloradans reporting eight or more days of poor mental health in the prior month, according to previous editions of the survey.

"While we aren't quite back to pre-pandemic levels again, I think that this is a data point that many folks have been eager to see," Mathur said of the 2025 number.

For the first time, the survey also looked at loneliness, asking questions about companionship, isolation and feeling left out and combining them into a single score. The survey found that 21.7% of Coloradans report feeling lonely. This was most notable in people who are gender-diverse, 61.9% of whom reported loneliness, and people who have a disability, 47.4% of whom reported loneliness.

Young adults, people who are Native American or Alaska Natives, and people who live alone also reported high rates of loneliness. Rates of loneliness were highest in Denver and lower in many rural areas.

Lindsey Whittington, the Colorado Health Institute's data and analysis manager, said these figures matter because loneliness is linked to poorer health. Among people in the survey who reported feeling lonely, 48.5% also reported poor mental health and 26% reported poor or fair physical health.

"This is really important in why people are tracking this metric," Whittington said.