If you or someone in your family is on Medicaid in Greeley or Brighton, two things happening right now matter more than any ad you’ll see this fall.
First: Two hospitals in your area—North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley and Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton, whose finances ripple out to local clinics that depend on them—have shown up on an independent watchdog’s list of facilities most at financial risk this year.
Second: Starting Jan. 1, 2027, hundreds of thousands of Coloradans on Medicaid will have to renew their coverage every six months instead of annually, and prove they’re working, in school, or volunteering to keep it.
That’s the backdrop for a fight playing out on TV and phone screens across Colorado’s 8th Congressional District right now. Two outside groups—neither one the Evans or Rutinel campaign itself—are making opposite claims about the same law: the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)
What each ad claims
The American Action Network, a group aligned with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), is running video ads targeting CO-8 specifically, as part of a $22 million campaign across 41 congressional districts that pushed the group’s spending to a record $62 million this cycle. The ad claims:
Gabe Evans delivered, passing the biggest tax cut in American history and voting to pass the biggest investment ever in rural health care. Call Gabe Evans. Thank him for cutting taxes and protecting rural health care.”
– American Action Network’s Aug./Sept. 2026 ad, in support of Rep. Gabe Evans
House Majority Forward, a Democrat-aligned group, is running a Spanish-language ad with an initial CO-8 buy of nearly $200,000, warning that “as many as 150,000 Colorado families” could lose coverage under the same law.
Here’s what holds up, and what doesn’t.
Fact-checking the claims
AAN: The “biggest investment claim is true, but incomplete.
The law does create a real $50 billion Rural Health Transformation program, and Colorado has already been awarded just over $200 million for this first year alone—real money. Evans himself has used this exact framing since September 2025, well before this ad existed.
What the ad doesn’t mention is that Colorado’s own health department projects the state will lose between $900 million and $2.5 billion a year by 2032, from cuts to hospital funding included in the same law—four to twelve times the size of this year’s rural health payment, once the cuts are fully phased in.
HMF: The “150,000 families” claim overstates its own math.
The estimate behind that number comes from a KFF analysis allocating national coverage-loss by state, reported locally by the Denver Gazette, and it describes roughly 150,000 individual Coloradans statewide who could lose coverage, not 150,000 families.
Separately, Colorado’s Division of Insurance has estimated up to 75,000 Coloradans could lose marketplace coverage specifically from the now-expired federal subsidies—a different, narrower number, but another sign the scale of loss is measured in individuals, not families. It’s also a statewide figure, not one specific to CO-8.
HMF: The “195% premium increase” claim cherry-picks the worst case.
The ad says premiums “would increase by 195%” because of these cuts. Colorado’s Division of Insurance set the statewide average net premium increase for 2026 at 101%. Increases near 195% are real, but concentrated in a handful of rural counties, not the state as a whole.
The ad also blurs two similar but separate problems together: these premium increases stem mainly from the expiration of enhanced federal ACA tax credits that Congress failed to renew—a different fight from the Medicaid provisions in the OBBBA that Evans voted for.The premium increases affect people who buy their own insurance on the individual market, not the Medicaid recipients described a sentence earlier in the same ad.
What it means for Greeley and Brighton hospitals
Public Citizen’s hospital-risk analysis names two CO-8 hospitals specifically at risk of closing, cutting services or laying off staff: North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley and Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton.
Using Third Way’s published methodology—multiplying each hospital’s Medicaid revenue by the projected statewide Medicaid funding cut—those two hospitals, plus a third in Greeley (UCHealth Greeley Hospital), stand to lose a combined $17.5 million a year in revenue.
When hospitals absorb losses like that, the effects don’t stop at the hospital’s doors. Reduced services and staffing can ripple out to health clinics and urgent-care patients who rely on those same health systems.
The paperwork nobody’s talking about yet
Separate from either ad’s claims, a real change is coming for roughly 377,000 Coloradans enrolled in Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act’s expansion—low-income adults without dependent children. Starting Jan. 1, 2027, they’ll need to renew their eligibility every six months instead of annually, and show they worked, studied, or volunteered at least 80 hours—or earned at least $580 — in one of those months. Notices will go out to affected residents this fall.
CO-8 alone has about 191,800 people on Medicaid, roughly one in four residents.
Ballots start mailing to every Colorado voter on Oct. 2. Both ads are trying to win your attention with a partial picture. The numbers behind them are more complicated—and more local—than either one lets on.
Read Courier Colorado’s CO-8 voter guide for a full breakdown of the race.
