By Frank Cornelia | June 12, 2025
When I was three, my mom packed me and my little brother into the car and drove us to a restaurant about an hour from where we lived. We were going to meet my dad, who recently entered treatment at Project Turnabout, then a fledgling addiction recovery center in rural Minnesota. He had just been granted permission for a family visit and, despite the negative effect alcohol was having on his life (and ours), he was still unsure about the idea of never drinking again.
At some point during that lunch, I asked him when he was coming home. He responded, “Your mom and some other people think daddy has a problem. Do you think I drink too much?”
As the story goes, I nodded yes. “Dad, why do you drink so much?”
Those words, spoken by an anxious and innocent child, became a turning point for my family. My dad stayed in treatment, built a life in recovery, eventually went back to school, and spent the last chapter of his life helping others as a case manager supporting people with developmental disabilities. When he died in 2020, one of my last gifts to him was an AA coin recognizing 41 years in recovery.
That personal history is one of the reasons I dedicated my career to expanding access to treatment for individuals and families affected by mental health and substance use disorders (SUD).
When I first joined the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council (CBHC) as a policy specialist, one of my first assignments was to answer a question from the state’s Medicaid agency, Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF): What would an expanded SUD benefit look like? My answer became a white paper making the case — a document that helped convince Gov. John Hickenlooper to include a budget increase in his 2014 fiscal year proposal.
My dad’s recovery journey was not an easy one. Just as the road to personal recovery is rarely straightforward, the work of advancing SUD policy in Colorado has been an uneven and often painfully incremental process. It’s easy to feel frustrated by how much work remains — but looking back today, I’m grateful for what we’ve been able to accomplish, much of it thanks to the leadership and sheer tenacity of U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, who has been open about how her mother’s recovery journey inspired her legislative efforts.
Since that first budget request, Colorado has become a model for expanding SUD programs and services:
- We were the first state in the nation to invest new recreational marijuana tax dollars into prevention, treatment and recovery.
- We established the Opioid and Other Substance Use Disorders Interim Study Committee, which led to dozens of bipartisan policies advancing harm reduction, early diversion from the criminal justice system and rural and frontier expansion (like HB19-1287).
- We passed HB18-1136 to expand Medicaid SUD residential treatment capacity and SB20-007 to modernize SUD emergency and involuntary commitment laws and strengthen insurance standards.
- We championed integration across mental health and SUD regulations (HB19-1237), stood up a new state agency and redefined our system (HB22-1278), promoted flexibility for professional supervision (HB24-1045) and pursued innovations like the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) model (HB24-1384).
Together, these efforts are making a difference: Colorado’s opioid-related death rate has begun to stabilize after years of steep increases, thanks to expanded naloxone access and treatment services.
Now, unfortunately, much of that progress is at risk.
H.R.1, recently passed by the U.S. House, is a threat to Medicaid, the largest payer for SUD treatment in the U.S., covering services like inpatient detoxification, intensive outpatient programs, and medication-assisted treatment. It imposes mandatory work requirements, tightens eligibility re-determinations, restricts how states can finance programs, and adds new limits to the budget neutrality of 1115 waivers — the very tools Colorado used to expand access to SUD treatment.
If these changes go forward, we risk cutting off people in recovery from the care they need. We risk dismantling the safety net that supports families like mine.
The organization I work for, CBHC, is facing its own set of challenges, including shifts in our membership, as Colorado’s behavioral health system continues to evolve. Like recovery and policy, this transformation journey has also been difficult — some of it the result of our own choices. But regardless of the challenges we face, our mission remains the same: to fight for access, quality and the dignity of treatment and recovery in a community-based setting. We stand ready to partner with all who share those values.
We cannot afford to go backward. We cannot let federal policy dismantle the very services that saved my dad — and Congresswoman Pettersen’s mom — and that continue to save thousands of Coloradans every year.
I urge my colleagues, partners and policymakers, including members of the United States Senate: Stand up for Medicaid. Stand up for families. Let’s keep working to build a system that offers help and hope to everyone who needs it.