Eight years ago, Colorado created a program to give hospitals more money to cover uncompensated costs on the promise it would lower insurance rates for all.

The state’s hospitals received $6.4 billion since then to cover charity care and unpaid bills from indigent patients — all money intended to reduce the cost-shift to people with private insurance.

But private payers — which make up the majority of Colorado — never saw the benefits trickle down.

The latest state figures show patients with private insurance paid $1.58 for every $1 of medical care at hospitals in 2015, an increase from the $1.55 rate before the program took effect.

The cost-shift to private payers is a significant shortcoming in the billion-dollar hospital provider fee program — but one that most state lawmakers are content to overlook as they race to preserve the system before the end of the legislative term.

The state House on the final day is expected to send Gov. John Hickenlooper a wide-ranging bill that would move the program to a separate entity, a move critics fear would reduce legislative oversight.

The bipartisan effort boasts broad support because it would prevent a $528 million cut in hospital payments and save rural operations that have become reliant on the program to survive.

Less attention is focused on why the program is not working as intended.

“It’s that interesting riddle that I have no idea how to answer,” said John Bartholomew, the state health care agency’s finance director. “Why are there some hospitals that are on the brink of bankruptcy even though Medicaid has been paying more for hundreds of thousands of new clients?”

Here’s how lawmakers expected it to work: The state would collect a fee from hospitals and match it with federal dollars to generate hundreds of millions to cover the uninsured and reduce the shift in costs from uncompensated care to people with private insurance.

The reduction in health insurance costs for most payers became a major selling point when lawmakers created the program in 2009. The Colorado Hospital Association emphasized the claim in a flyer distributed to lawmakers at the time, and the organization’s president touted the benefits in his testimony.

“That cost-shift increases the cost of everyone else’s health care, and we believe this will reduce the rate of increase as a result,” Steven Summer told lawmakers.

The program increased how much the state reimburses hospitals for Medicaid patients from 54 percent of the costs in 2009 to 75 percent in 2015.

In addition, the expansion in 2013 of Medicaid in Colorado under the Affordable Care Act also sent hospitals more paying patients, reducing the number of uninsured using expensive emergency-room services without being able to pay.

The amount of uncompensated care for hospitals fell from $2.3 billion in 2009 to $1 billion in 2015, but it did little to change the equation.

“We don’t have a whole lot of line of sight for what’s going on,” Bartholomew said.

Hickenlooper’s administration pushed a bill earlier this session to add transparency to the hospital provider fee program by requiring more detailed financial statements from health systems.

But the hospital association helped defeat the measure in a Republican-led Senate committee, saying it was unnecessary and the administration didn’t know how to analyze the data.

“It doesn’t lower health care costs for consumers. What it does do is add more government regulation,” said Chris Tholen, the association’s chief financial officer.

The move angered the legislation’s advocates who argue the program only pads hospital profit margin, allowing them to build new facilities and add new services.

The hospital provider fee program “really does nothing to offset or put any cost-containment measures on what hospitals are able to charge for their services,” said Charlie Sheffield, the executive director for the Colorado Association of Health Plans, a health insurance industry group. “There’s more going into those costs than simply just balancing out uncompensated care — with the profit margin being one of those cushions … when they set their rates.”

Hospital executives dispute the assertion and defended the program. Without it, they said, the cost-shift to people with private insurance would have been worse.

“The provider fee has actually helped us not see a severe escalation of cost,” said Margo Karsten, the CEO of Banner Health’s medical facilities in northern Colorado. “It may not have been a decrease like we had hoped, but at least it hasn’t escalated to where it could have been.”

Jamie Smith, the president of Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver, said he hoped the combination would “bend the curve of cost increases for everyone else.”

He said “turning the clock back” is not a solution, even if the numbers are not showing progress.

“It does take some time to yield those benefits,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you that it’s been a magic solution, by any means, to our cost problems. But it is certainly moving in the right direction.”