Jared Polis, Colorado Democrat Candidate for Gov, Doubled Personal Wealth While in Congress

Jared Polis, the Democrat candidate for Governor in Colorado, doubled his personal wealth during his few terms in Congress, according to reports.

Polis is one of the ten richest members of Congress, but in the ten years he represented Colorado’s Second District his wealth doubled, according to an analysis of his financial reports conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Polis entered Congress in 2009, but by 2014, his wealth grew to about $387 million from profits from his Colorado-based healthcare company, BridgeHealth Medical. Unsurprisingly, Polis was a big “yes” vote on Obamacare.

The suspicious conflict of interest sparked Breitbart’s Peter Schweizer to note in his book Throw Them All Out  that Polis’ investments are “[o]ne of the more creative and cynical plays on health care reform.”

In other words, Polis was betting that there would be more, not less, medical tourism after the passage of health care reform. Companies in the medical tourism industry generally agreed and favored Obamacare. They did not believe the bill would actually contain costs, and if anything, they expected overseas medical procedures to become more attractive. Medical Tourism magazine featured an article after the passage of the bill entitled, “Medical Tourism Expands as Alternative to Obama- care.” As the article put it, “Interest in medical tourism has expanded rapidly as Americans react to the new federal law.”

For his part, Polis has denied accusations that he has unfairly benefited from his votes.

“The fact is I have not purchased stock in any publicly traded company since entering Congress,” Polis insisted. “[Schweizer’s] assertions are blatantly and verifiably false. Additionally, when I was first elected in 2008, I decided to set up a blind trust to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, a step few members take, and that is not required.”

Schweizer, though, was less than impressed with Polis’ rebuttal.

“Congressman Jared Polis offers a remarkable display of misdirection and outright deception in his response to my book Throw Them All Out, which was excerpted in The Denver Post, Schweizer wrote.

“First note what Congressman Polis is not denying: that he made multimillion dollar equity investments that stood to benefit greatly from legislation he was working on and supported,” the author added. “And the timing of those transactions confirms to the work he was doing on Capitol Hill.”

Schweizer sharply retorted that Polis seems more interested in covering his “assets” than in “coming clean.”

Those assets are tremendous, too. According to Free Beacon:

A summary of the 2015 disclosures shows Polis listing assets for a blind trust in the range of $25 to $50 million. However, based on estimates from the Center for Responsive Politics, Polis had at least four other assets listed in the same monetary range, making it a reasonable estimate that his blind trust only represented between 10 and 30 percent of his overall wealth. And his investments in BridgeHealth, which have continued well into 2015, have never been in the blind trust.

Indeed, Polis is listed at Open Secrets as the second richest man in Congress with an estimated wealth of $313,556,221.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.