When asked if he supports the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Colorado congressional candidate Gabe Evans has responded not with a yes-or-no answer but by suggesting that he wants a healthcare system “without all the ACA-imposed red tape.”
Evans, who represents Ft. Lupton at the Statehouse, has yet to offer a specific proposal to do this, but congressional efforts in the past — promoted in part around the idea of cutting red tape and deregulating the health care industry — would have thrown the “health care system back to the Wild West where people were denied health insurance for preexisting conditions or rated based on your gender and other terrible things that we know people don’t want to see again,” said Colorado Consumer Health Initiative’s Adam Fox.
“What is clear from what he said is that he doesn’t support the Affordable Care Act,” said Fox after reviewing Evans’ recent comments on Obamacare. “It’s clear he doesn’t understand health insurance market dynamics. The Affordable Care Act was designed very carefully to function with all of its parts, and if you cut one piece of it, it threatens the entire system.”
On at least two occasions, Evans refused to answer reporters’ direct questions on whether he’d support repealing Obamacare, once after a debate in January and a second time during a GOP primary debate last month, when he was asked directly if he supported “Donald Trump’s call to terminate the Affordable Care Act.”
Instead of answering the question, he first discussed his personal experience with his child’s serious health needs. He then attacked “leftists” for allegedly causing “four health care insurance companies” to leave Colorado. Then he outlined his views about red tape, middlemen, and putting doctors and patients “back in control.”
“So what we need to do is, we need to cut the red tape,” Evans said at the June debate. “We need to put doctors and patients back in control of their health care. We need to cut out the middlemen. There are so many ways that you can streamline the system and make it much more affordable by putting patients and doctors in control of their healthcare. Unfortunately, what the left doe s — what Obama did — added more red tape. It added more hurdles for folks to be able to do. I support putting doctors and patients back in control of their healthcare without all of the ACA-imposed red tape.”
Asked how he’d do that, Evans referred at the June debate to the Gold Card program, which is one of several proposals to streamline prior authorizations for certain medical appointments. That’s a minor adjustment that doesn’t support Evans’ position that Obamacare simply added “more red tape” to the health care system, said Fox. “The red tape that exists in our health care system is driven by the incentives hospitals and insurers have,” said Fox. “It is not driven by the Affordable Care Act.”
Evans’ opponent, incumbent Democrat Yadira Caraveo, was an early supporter of the Affordable Care Act and has expressed ongoing support for the law.
Caraveo and Evans are running to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, which is expected to be the battleground not only for one of the most competitive U.S. House races in Colorado but in the entire country. The seat, which is located mostly north of Denver, was created after the 2020 U.S. Census.
