Colorado voters approved Proposition MM, a measure that caps itemized tax deductions for residents earning more than $300,000 in adjusted gross income and redirects the difference — an estimated $100 million annually — into mental health treatment, substance use recovery, and crisis intervention services across the state.
At a glance
- Colorado mental health funding: Proposition MM limits deductions for high earners rather than raising tax rates, generating roughly $100 million per year dedicated to behavioral health services.
- Rural access: A significant share of new revenue is directed toward rural and frontier communities, which face the state’s most severe shortages of behavioral health providers.
- Crisis intervention: The measure funds expanded mobile crisis units and walk-in centers, offering community-based alternatives to emergency rooms and police response during mental health emergencies.
Why stable funding changes everything
Mental health programs in the U.S. have long lived and died by the budget cycle. They expand when revenues are strong and shrink when lawmakers face competing priorities. Proposition MM breaks that pattern by tying a protected revenue stream directly to behavioral health — insulating it from year-to-year political volatility.
The mechanism matters. By capping deductions rather than raising rates, the measure closes a gap between what the state’s wealthiest filers can deduct and what middle-income families can. The revenue flows to mental health services whether or not any given legislative session makes behavioral health a priority. That kind of structural protection is rare, and it’s exactly what the sector has lacked for decades.
Colorado isn’t the first state to experiment with progressive revenue streams for public health. But the clarity of this approach — the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has documented how unpredictable funding cycles worsen care gaps — makes it a model other states may study closely.
Reaching the communities left furthest behind
Colorado’s behavioral health system has never been equally distributed. Denver and its suburbs have options. Rural counties — across the San Luis Valley, the Western Slope, and the eastern plains — often have almost none. A single provider may cover terrain the size of a small New England state.
Proposition MM explicitly directs funding toward those underserved areas. It also allocates resources to organizations providing culturally competent care for populations whose needs have historically gone unmet, including Spanish-speaking communities with deep roots in the region and Indigenous communities whose relationship with state health systems has been shaped by decades of historical harm.
The provider shortage won’t disappear quickly. Research from KFF shows that recruiting and retaining mental health professionals in rural areas takes years of sustained investment. But building the financial infrastructure is the necessary first step, and this measure takes it.
A better answer to a crisis call
One of the measure’s most concrete investments is in crisis diversion. When someone experiences a mental health emergency today, the two most common responses are an emergency room visit or a police call. Neither is well designed for the job.
Emergency departments are expensive, often overwhelming for someone in psychiatric distress, and not structured for behavioral health care. Law enforcement involvement, even when handled thoughtfully, can escalate situations that call for clinical de-escalation. Mobile crisis teams and walk-in centers offer something neither can: a calm, clinical, community-based response.
Expanding that infrastructure helps the person in crisis. It also reduces strain on hospitals and frees law enforcement to focus on what it’s actually equipped to handle. The benefits compound across the system.
A real foundation — with real limits
$100 million annually is meaningful. It is not a complete solution. Workforce shortages, insurance parity gaps, and the persistent stigma around seeking behavioral health care remain real obstacles that no ballot measure can fix on its own.
What Proposition MM does is remove one of the largest structural barriers: the absence of reliable money. It gives Colorado’s behavioral health system a foundation to build on — something to plan around, rather than a funding floor that vanishes when budgets tighten. The vote also signals something about public readiness. Colorado’s electorate looked at a clear proposition — ask those most able to contribute, protect the revenue, direct it to a specific public good — and said yes.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Colorado Politics
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