Dead Patients, Empty Seats, & a Train Nobody Asked For

Colorado built a Medicaid program to do something genuinely good: make sure people who can’t get to a doctor’s appointment don’t miss it for lack of a ride. The idea is sound. What followed is a case study in what happens when a well-designed program meets determined fraud. Someone billed $3.3 million for rides that never happened, including repeated invoices for a patient who had already died. Pause on that. A patient died, and someone kept submitting paperwork. Month after month. Trips to appointments the patient could not attend because they had, medically speaking, stopped existing. A Mesa County woman billed over a million dollars in rides — including transportation for her husband on days he was incarcerated. Both now face federal charges. The state has suspended 64 providers, blocked 600 more, and flagged $25 million in abnormal billing in four months. The Attorney General’s fraud unit has recovered $50 million and convicted 62 people since taking office. The work matters. But the episode is also a prompt: we built a multimillion-dollar system to replace something neighbors used to do for each other. While the auditors audit, maybe we introduce ourselves to the person three doors down.

School District 49 — eastern Colorado Springs and Falcon, 27,000 students — cut 50 positions and declared a State of Fiscal Exigency. That’s the formal legal declaration that allows workforce reductions. The word “exigency” sounds like an emergency. It may be. Or it may be an organization that has finally decided what it actually needs. The superintendent says there’s no fat left. The union says revenue has been underestimated by 20 percent for years and wants a detailed plan. Both could be true. A board member resigned before the vote. Cuts included librarians and bilingual staff. Sometimes audits find inefficiency. Sometimes they find people. You don’t know which this is until you look. The budget is at d49.org. School board meetings are public.

The pitch for Front Range passenger rail is compelling on its face: five million people, I-25 projected to double in travel time, twelve to fifteen dollars a ticket from Pueblo to Fort Collins. Clean, green, visionary. But the proposal carries questions that deserve clear answers before a single dollar is committed. Will anyone ride it? California’s Pacific Surfliner — one of the most favorable rail corridors in the country — carried under two million passengers in 2024 and still fights for ridership. Colorado Springs is a driving city. We have an airport. We already have Bustang. Who fills the trains? Beyond ridership: Colorado law allows station area improvement districts within two miles of a station, with authority to levy additional property taxes on nearby properties. If a station lands near you, your neighborhood may look materially different in twenty years. Not necessarily worse — but denser, more connected, more changed. The demand study, the ridership projections, and who funded them should be in front of the public before the concrete is poured. The public forum is March 26th, 3:30 PM, Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center. That is the room where questions belong.

City Council voted twice in the same session and produced one policy. They banned car camping. They approved $4.8 million in federal grants for homeless housing support. Enforcement and investment. You can agree with both. You can disagree with both. What you cannot do is pretend they’re unrelated. A ban without housing is theater. Housing without accountability is also a problem. The question is whether both get followed through. Check back in six months. Did the money get spent on what it was approved for? Did enforcement stay consistent? That follow-through is the story.

Finally: the Pikes Peak Library District has a developmental toy checkout program. Six locations. Three-week loans. Free with a library card. A toy that makes a three-year-old stack blocks and try again when they fall is not entertainment — it’s practice in persistence. The championship moments visible to the world come from repetition that nobody watched. Go to ppld.org. Get a library card. Sit on the floor and let them figure it out.