Amid an ongoing epidemic of opioid and heroin overdoses, Colorado’s largest provider of treatment for drug and alcohol abuse will close its doors early next year, the victim of long-running financial losses and low government payments.

Arapahoe House announced Friday that its last day at all of its locations will be Jan. 2. As of Friday, it will no longer accept new patients. It currently serves 5,000 people a year, all of whom will have to find a new treatment provider.

“It’s horrible,” Arapahoe House CEO Mike Butler said in an interview. “We’ve been struggling with being underfunded for many, many years. We’ve been losing a fair amount of money for many years.”

Arapahoe House has facilities in Denver, Wheat Ridge, Thornton, Westminster, Littleton, Aurora and Lakewood. The nonprofit has existed for 42 years.

Last year, though, it reported expenses nearly $3.5 million more than revenue. Butler said the last time Arapahoe House broke even in a year may have been seven years ago, and it has used its reserves since then to cover losses.

“We’ve simply depleted our reserves,” he said.

More than 90 percent of Arapahoe House’s patients are low-income, meaning that the provider is “completely dependent,” as Butler put it, on payments from the state and federal government. But Butler said those payments haven’t kept up with the cost of providing care.

Looking ahead, he said, Arapahoe House expects Congress and the Trump administration will try to cut Medicaid funding further. State Sen. Cheri Jahn, a Democrat from Wheat Ridge who serves on Arapahoe House’s board of directors, said in a statement that the Trump administration’s declaration of a national opioid crisis has so far brought no new money for treatment.

“Treatment hasn’t been adequately covered for years,” she said in her statement, “and it’s only going to get worse.”

In a separate statement, Robert Werthwein of the Colorado Department of Human Services, which oversees treatment providers in Colorado, said additional state and federal money has gone toward battling substance abuse in recent years. He pointed to a 2015 state law that made an extra $12 million available annually and to a 2016 federal law that sent $15.6 million to Colorado over two years.

“Yet, it’s clear that the need for services outpaces the resources available to provide them,” Werthwein, director of CDHS’s Office of Behavioral Health, said in the statement.

Colorado, like the rest of the nation, is struggling to deal with a boom in heroin and prescription opioid abuse. Last year, 228 people in Colorado died of a heroin overdose, and treatment admissions for opioid abuse grew by more than 50 percent between 2013 and 2016.

A survey this year by the Colorado Health Institute found that there are approximately 67,000 Coloradans who say they need treatment for substance use but aren’t receiving it. Those on Medicaid or who are uninsured were more likely to say they have unmet treatment needs, according to the survey.

That is why the loss of Arapahoe House is so significant, said Sarah McAfee, a spokeswoman for the Colorado-based Center for Health Progress. Although addiction does not discriminate based on class, those with less money are less likely to get the help they need — especially in-patient treatment, which Arapahoe House offered.

With one fewer safety-net provider in the city, McAfee said law enforcement and human services agencies will be more likely to pick up the burden of dealing with untreated addiction.

“These costs don’t just go away,” she said. “They get shifted somewhere else.”

Arapahoe House stopped offering detox services last year in a bid to cut spending and focus on treatment. With the full closure, Butler said Arapahoe House’s 200 employees will be looking for new jobs — although, he said, the robust demand for their services means staffers will probably be able to find work quickly.

Butler said Arapahoe House is also working to find new providers for each of its clients, and he said the provider’s help line — 303-657-3700 — has added capacity and will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday until Jan. 2.

Werthwein said the state and Signal Behavioral Health Network, which manages treatment services for providers across the metro area, are working together to find Arapahoe House clients new help. Patients can go to signalbhn.org/find-treatment or call 1-888-607-4462 to find a provider in the Denver area. Statewide, people can call 1-844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255 to find a provider.

Despite these efforts, however, Butler said there are ultimately only a handful of other treatment providers in the metro area that take Medicaid and serve Arapahoe House’s safety-net role.

“It’s a very sad day,” he said. “There are very few options for this vulnerable population.”