One day after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill restricting gender-affirming care, Gov. Jared Polis on Friday signed into law legislation that requires health insurance plans in Colorado to cover the treatment.
Colorado’s administrative insurance rules had already prohibited health insurers from unduly restricting or denying access to gender-affirming care. House Bill 1309 takes that rule and codifies it into state law. It also removes testosterone from the list of medications that are tracked by the state’s drug monitoring system.
The bill is “really important policy for vulnerable people who the federal government is going after,” Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat and the state legislature’s first transgender lawmaker, said at the bill signing Friday. “And we’re here to say Colorado is not going to be the place where you have to be afraid. This is a place where you can come and be safe, be yourself, get the care you need, and live your best life.”
Titone sponsored HB-1309 with fellow Democrats Rep. Kyle Brown and Sens. Julie Gonzales and Lisa Cutter.
The bill — and another measure signed last week, adding anti-discrimination protections for transgender people — come amid a federal crackdown on gender-affirming care.
On Thursday, Republicans in the House passed President Donald Trump’s tax bill. Among its provisions is language that prohibits Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for people of any age. It also strikes the treatment as an essential health benefit under the Affordable Care Act, banning its coverage under plans offered by the ACA.
HB-1309 doesn’t impact Medicaid — its provisions cover private insurers. But state fiscal analysts previously warned that if the federal government stops covering gender-affirming care as an essential health benefit — as Congress and federal regulators are poised to do — then the state may have to pay the additional costs incurred by insurers for covering it.
It’s unclear how much that additional cost may be, according to the fiscal analysts who examined the bill’s impacts for the state legislature. In early May, lawmakers introduced a late amendment to the bill allowing the state to accept gifts, grants and donations that could be used to help cover the costs of gender-affirming care.
A spokeswoman for the Division of Insurance did not immediately return a request for comment Friday morning.
Colorado was the first state to add gender-affirming care as an essential health benefit, a change approved by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2021.
Democratic lawmakers said Friday that the restrictions on the treatment coming from Washington, D.C., motivated the law’s passage.
“We all know that administrations change, politicians change, and we need to make sure that health care in Colorado can’t be taken away by politicians in the future,” Brown, of Louisville, said. “So today, we’re sending a clear message. Coloradans will not let politics get in the way of medical care as we face national efforts to erase access to gender-affirming care, including threats to Medicaid and pending decisions at the Supreme Court.”
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