Mar 30

Business leaders battle Republican lawmaker in hospital-fee bill hearing

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Business leaders battle Republican lawmaker in hospital-fee bill hearing

Denver Traffic cars

KATHLEEN LAVINE | DENVER BUSINESS JOURNAL

Overcrowded highways like this stretch of C-470 near Yosemite would be a primary beneficiary of the hospital-provider fee bill, business leaders argue.

Colorado business leaders charged into the state Capitol Tuesday to advocate for a newly introduced change in the hospital provider fee that they believe will increase funding for transportation and education — and ran right into a key Republican legislator who questioned whether they would be taking revenues illegally from companies and individuals that need them more.

House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst’s long-planned bill to pull some $700 million out from under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) revenue cap and turn it into an enterprise fund received its first hearing in the House Appropriations Committee Tuesday, one day after it was introduced.

Committee Democrats passed it onto the House floor over the objections of Republicans, the first of several steps in what is expected to be a weeks-long fight over one of the most watched measures of this legislative session.

The seven-year-old provider fee charges hospitals for each night a bed is occupied, leverages that money to get an equal amount of federal matching funds and expands the eligibility of childless adults for Medicaid, reducing the burden of uncompensated care on hospitals.

By turning the fee into an enterprise, it frees a lot more room for the state to collect new revenues without reaching its TABOR cap and having to give back any excess money as tax refunds.

 

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Mar 30

Bipartisan Hospital Provider Fee Bill Introduced At Colorado Capitol

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Bipartisan Hospital Provider Fee Bill Introduced At Colorado Capitol

By Megan Verlee on 03/29/2016 – 7:20am

The Colorado State Capitol.

(Hart Van Denburg/CPR News)

State lawmakers introduced a bill Monday that would eliminate tax refunds and give the state more money to spend.Colorado is collecting so much money that it has to send some of it back to residents, as required by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

But Democrats say there’s a big pot of money in the state budget that shouldn’t count toward the TABOR limit. It’s a fee hospitals pay that the state spends on expanding health coverage for the poor.

The new bill changes how the state accounts for this fee, making it exempt from TABOR. That would effectively allow the state to hold onto hundreds of millions of dollars it would otherwise have to pay out in tax rebates.

A separate measure, which would only apply to next year, directs lawmakers to spend the extra money on transportation, local governments, and schools.

The fee-change bill has bipartisan sponsorship. Sen. Larry Crowder, a Republican, says the change could help rural hospitals in his southeastern district.

However the Republicans who control the state Senate strongly oppose the reclassification, calling it an end-run around TABOR.

House Speaker Dickie Lee Hullinghorst said she tried to work with Senate leaders.

“There didn’t seem to be a way that we could get together,” she said. “And I felt that we had to move forward.”

– See more at: http://www.cpr.org/news/newsbeat/bipartisan-hospital-provider-fee-bill-introduced-colorado-capitol#sthash.0JGvqvqF.dpuf

Mar 30

Speaker: Talks on proposal to eliminate TABOR refunds at a stalemate

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Speaker: Talks on proposal to eliminate TABOR refunds at a stalemate

Rep. Dickey Lee Hullinghorst of Boulder was nominated as majority leader during the Colorado House of Representatives Democratic Caucus at the state Capitol in Denver, CO, Thursday November 8, 2012. Democrats took back the majority in the House after Tuesday’s election, and will have a 37-28 majority when the session opens in January. Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

DENVER – The speaker of the Colorado House said negotiations have reached a “stalemate” on a long-debated and highly anticipated proposal to retain more state revenue through an accounting change that would eliminate TABOR refunds in future years.

The prospects for the bills Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst introduced Monday are poor in the Republican-dominated Senate.

One of the bills reauthorizes a fee charged on hospital stays so that millions of dollars go into an enterprise fund that is exempt from the spending limits in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The other bill spends the revenue the state would retain if the first bill passes.

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Mar 29

Hospital provider fee bill introduced in Colorado Legislature — with Republican Senate sponsor

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Colorado House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst introduced her anticipated bill to turn the hospital provider fee into an enterprise fund Monday with two twists — a Republican sponsor in the Senate and a companion bill allocating general-fund money that would be freed up if the bill were to pass.

Created in 2009, the fee is assessed on hospitals for each night that a bed is filled with a patient, and the revenue is used to receive match funding from the federal government and to increase Medicaid eligibility for childless adults.

House Speaker-designee Dickey Lee Hullinghorst unpacking in her new office at the capitol.Enlarge

House Speaker-designee Dickey Lee Hullinghorst unpacking in her new office at the capitol.

KATHLEEN LAVINE, BUSINESS JOURNAL

It has generated billions of dollars in reimbursements for hospitals that treated previously uninsured patients with no capacity to pay bills, but because the revenue counts against the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) revenue cap, it also pushes the state toward exceeding the cap and having to give taxpayers refunds with money that could otherwise have gone to areas such as education and transportation. Continue reading →

Mar 26

Colorado’s provider ‘fee’: Even the federal government knows its a tax

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March 25, 2016 12:22 PM· By Linda Gorman

In 2009, the Democrats controlling Colorado state government wanted more money. Among other things, they wanted to expand Medicaid. They needed to increase state revenues. Their problem was that the Colorado Constitution requires a vote on new state taxes and the U.S. was in the depths of a severe economic downturn.

icon_blog_noteState officials knew that a new tax would never be approved by a popular vote. To get around both the letter and the spirit of their constitutional duty, they simply labeled the provider tax a “fee” and imposed it. Fees do not require a vote.

Today that tax badly disguised as a fee is raising $688 million in additional revenues that is counted towards the total amount of tax revenue that the state is allowed to keep under the Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).

 

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Mar 25

Colorado budget bill eliminates TABOR refunds, slashes spending

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Hospitals and road construction take a hit, but budget writers warn it could have been far worse

(Denver Post file)

Facing a money crunch, Colorado lawmakers resorted to extraordinary feats to craft a $27 billion budget bill Thursday, eliminating a $59 million taxpayer refund, slashing $73 million of payments to hospitals and cutting $50 million for road construction.

Even then, budget writers needed to pull millions from other cash accounts and tap reserves to balance the spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

But the moves prevented even deeper spending cuts to classrooms, college campuses and health care providers that Gov. John Hickenlooper proposed in his budget plan.

Click (HERE) to read the rest of the story:

 

Mar 20

Low state revenues may mean no TABOR refunds next year

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Low state revenues may mean no TABOR refunds next year

2016_Legislature_LOGOS

By Charles Ashby
Saturday, March 19, 2016

DENVER — State revenues have dropped off a bit, enough that it could prevent an automatic refund under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, state economists told lawmakers on Friday.

Projections for the next fiscal year are expected to be down by about $111 million, meaning the state likely won’t reach the revenue cap that automatically triggers a refund under TABOR as had been expected from the last forecast in December, the Colorado Legislature’s chief economist, Natalie Mullis, told members of the Joint Budget Committee.

“We did lower our expectations for general fund revenue,” Mullis said. “In December, we expected that general fund revenue would grow by 1.8 percent this year, which is actually negative if you adjust for population growth and inflation. It’s slowed down a little bit to 1.5 percent in this revenue forecast. That impacts the bottom line.”

In her forecast for the first quarter of 2016, Mullis said that the national and state economies expanded last year, but slowed somewhat in the second half of 2015. Continue reading →

Mar 20

Lower Colorado budget forecast renews TABOR fight

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Lower Colorado budget forecast renews TABOR fight

DENVER – The state will take in less money in 2016-17 than previously forecast by economists due in large part to the struggling global economy, but the roughly $90 million decrease in revenue, is a proverbial drop in Colorado’s $26 billion budget bucket.

Lawmakers will use the March forecast to set the fiscal year 2016-17 budget in the next week, but not much has changed from when the governor released his recommended budget in November. That is largely because lawmakers made mid-year adjustments to the 2015-16 budget to provide a budgeting cushion in case of a downturn.

Lawmakers on Friday received a forecast from Natalie Mullis, chief economist with the Legislative Council, and the governor’s budget office. This year the forecasts were extremely close.

“We did lower our expectations for general fund revenue,” Mullis said. “We already had expectations for slowed growth in revenue. In December we expected that general fund revenue would grow by 1.8 percent this year, which is actually negative if you adjust for population and inflation. It slowed down again a little bit, to 1.5 percent in this revenue forecast,”

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