One is a little girl whose eyes twinkle when it’s time for music class at school.

One is a mom whose Alzheimer’s disease grew so severe she forgot how to use a spoon.

One is a man whose greatest joy at his job is placing foam covers onto coat hangers.

In Colorado, one of every five people receives health benefits through Medicaid. And their lives may be about to change dramatically.

The revisions to Medicaid proposed in the Republican-backed health care plans currently in Congress would constitute the biggest restructuring of the program in generations, health experts agree. The plans would cut the growth of Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide and, for the first time, place strict dollar limits on how much the federal government contributes to Medicaid programs in each state.

For Colorado, these changes would mean $14 billion to $15 billion less in federal revenue for the program over the plans’ first 10 years compared with current law, according to the nonpartisan Colorado Health Institute. State officials have said it is all but certain, if those cuts take place, that they would have to rethink who should be eligible for Medicaid and how much help those individuals should receive.

That means programs that provide health coverage to the poor and the low-income, the disabled and the majority of people in nursing homes would come up for review. Programs that help people with disabilities live independently or that provide in-home care to children would face scrutiny.

Some Medicaid beneficiaries say they worry the changes would pit groups of needy Coloradans against one another, all fighting over diminished resources.

“Bottom line?” said Marc Williams, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which administers Medicaid in Colorado. “Anything and everything is at risk in the event of a federal cutback that has been suggested.”

For Linda Gorman, a health policy analyst at the conservative and libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, the changes wouldn’t be all bad. Medicaid, she argued, has seen spending rise dramatically in Colorado in part because the state brought so many people under its cover — its caseload has tripled in the past decade. The program should first and foremost care for the disabled, she said. Trying to turn it into a universal insurance program for large swaths of the state, she said, endangers that mission.

“We need to do some serious thinking about what Medicaid is for,” she said. “It shouldn’t be to provide insurance for healthy people. There’s no point in spending public money on healthy people.”