Legislators returned for their 2006 session last week.
Hundreds of bills will pass through their hands over the next few months, and many of them are devoted to healthcare.
There are bills to get more people insured.
Bills to cut down on drug abuse.
And lots of bills that seek to make healthcare cheaper.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens has more on what two thousand six is serving up in healthcare legislation.
When it comes to healthcare, cost seems to be on every legislator’s mind.
The cost of health insurance, the cost of medical treatment, and the cost of not having either one.
Annual healthcare spending in the state, according to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, is seven and a half billion dollars.
And many policy makers say we’re paying far too much.
But efforts to reign in expenses are hindered by the fact that no one really knows where those costs come from.
Kurk: It’s very difficult to find that kind of information.
Representative Neal Kurk is proposing a bill that would require hospitals and nursing homes to display to the public what they charge for services.
Kurk: We’re moving into an age now where with high deductible policies and health savings accounts, we’re trying to bring back marketplace competition into healthcare, empowering consumers to make intelligent choices. And in order to do that consumers have to know what the price costs.
Representative Kurk’s bill is an example of a legislative trend toward mandating what’s called transparency in healthcare.
And while Kurk is working on clearing up costs, Senator Maggie Hassan, a democrat from Exeter, is focused on making health insurance more transparent.
Under her bill, companies would have to report to the insurance department how they rate members’ premiums, what their profits are, and where they see healthcare costs changing.
Hassan: I think, one, consumers should be able to see it and perhaps shop among carriers, but two, we want our insurance department to police the industry, which they have the authority to do but they don’t always have the information to do.
Senator Hassan says the information is also necessary for lawmakers to figure out if the current health insurance policy is working for small employers.
Insurance law changed dramatically over the last several years, and there are a number of bills this year focused on tweaking and tracking its progress.
Lawmakers are also seeking transparency in healthcare to improve quality.
Two bills would require hospitals to publish infection rates.
Manchester republican Leo Pepino is sponsoring one of the bills, because he saw his wife contract numerous infections while she was dying of cancer.
Her death this year also inspired another bill, which would start a drug recycling program.
Pepino: After she passed away, I had all this medicine here. And I’m not kidding you, I had thousands of dollars worth here. You can’t give it away, nobody wants it, so what do you do with it? Only throw it away.
The proposed recycling system would take unopened drugs and distribute them to needy patients.
Representative Pepino estimates that the state’s Medicaid program could save millions by using donated drugs.
Last year a number of bills looked at trimming down on New Hampshire’s one point one billion dollar Medicaid program and this year is no different.
One bill penalizes healthcare providers if Medicaid reimburses them for unnecessary services.
Another bill makes employers pay a fee to Medicaid if they don’t contribute enough money to their employees’ healthcare.
The idea, called pay or play, seeks to make employers cover health insurance so people don’t land up on Medicaid, or go without.
The US Census Bureau reported about ten percent of people in New Hampshire do not have health insurance.
Dover democratic rep Peter Schmidt wants to put an end to that with a bill that subsidizes health insurance for adults, much like the Healthy Kids program does for children.
Schmidt: It’s in the best interest of the people of this state to make sure that everyone has health coverage. And to the degree people can’t afford it, just like we don’t let people starve and sleep under bridges and be homeless if we could possibly prevent it, that’s what social security is about, that people not be basically discarded just because they are not as financially capable as some others are.
Representative Schmidt says this isn’t the first time the idea has been proposed.
He recalls a similar bill passed the House and Senate in nineteen ninety seven, but died in a committee of conference.
Another bill to resurface this year is the statewide smoking ban.
But this incarnation has a new sponsor—and previous opponent—Representative Sheila Francoeur, a republican from Hampton.
She says this year several things have changed.
The first is that people are more aware of the health hazards of second hand smoke.
Francoeur: Secondly, one of the economic reasons that I did not support this bill in the past—I voted against it—was that none of the neighboring states had gone smoke free. Now all our neighboring states are smoke free, so the argument that we would lose some tourist trade to Massachusetts, Maine or Vermont, that argument is no longer there.
If that fails, republican representative Jim Pilliod from Belmont hopes his bill that allows towns to enforce their own smoking bans will pass.
He’s also sponsoring a bill attempting to cut down on what he calls horrendous levels of prescription drug abuse in the state.
The bill proposes tracking prescriptions for drugs that are often abused, and letting hospitals and pharmacies share the information.
Pilliod: This would record at the pharmacy level or at the hospital emergency room, whichever, what was done and not necessarily reveal a person’s name altogether, but enough identification so that it will be recorded. And then they can know, eh, this guy was just down at Elliot Hospital and picked up some medication there so this is probably just a scam.
Representative Pilliod’s bill is just one of several looking at preventing drug abuse.
And it’s only one of the dozens and dozens addressing healthcare in New Hampshire.
There is even a bill that proposes designing a healthcare advisory board, one that would help legislators approach the problems they are obviously already trying to tackle.
SOQ
