Farleygrams Again

Steve Farley is setting the standard for constituent communication with his newletter. You can and should join his mailing list, even if you aren’t in LD 28. Steve’s latest has a call to action for those on the Northwest side of Tucson to help save the state-run Health Care Group program:

We will see the fate of the bill once they allow it to be voted upon.
Or IF they allow it to be voted on–it is entirely possible that they
may never have the votes to kill HCG. One thing you can do right now
is to call Rep. Pete Hershberger’s office (602-926-5839), and get all
your Northwest side friends to do the same. Tell him that you know
that HB2498 will kill HealthCare Group, and urge a No vote, for the
sake of all the small businesspeople in his district who would have
no other options for health care. This could come up for a third read
again tomorrow, so time is of the essence. Your efforts could make
all the difference.

Steve has some background on the GOP machinations to kill this wonderful program for those of you not familiar with the issue:

One of those votes that was delayed further was the final roll call
vote for HB2498, the bill  that would kill Health Care Group–the
excellent state-run health insurance plan for small businesses. The
Star printed an excellent editorial on Monday calling for the bill’s
defeat, entitled "Effort to scrap health program is shortsighted,"
which is well worth reading at
http://www.azstarnet.com/opinion/172866.php

We did get through  18 of those other bills on third read today, but
they skipped 2498 because, thanks to a lot of hard work (see below),
it didn’t have the votes. It is on the agenda for tomorrow, so the
arm-twisting will continue.

Last Thursday during a nearly 7-hour COW (Committee Of the Whole, as
you may recall), I was proud  to accept the Governor’s request to
lead the floor fight to kill HB2498. We had a very spirited debate
that lasted for more than 90 minutes, and involved numerous exchanges
within the caucus and across party lines.

The  bill’s sponsor, Kirk Adams, created a whole new amendment on the
floor that invented a couple of new ways to gut HealthCare Group
(HCG), to replace the other ways the previous amendments tried to
kill it. The most outrageous effort was to strip all coverage from
the spouses and children of current HCG members, dumping perhaps
10,000 people on the streets without health insurance. It would also
cut off from care 17 different small towns and fire districts whose
employees and dependents currently receive care under HCG.

The amendment also would place HCG under the auspices of the
Department of Insurance, under Title 20, a section of regulatory law
suited to companies that sell insurance, not companies that provide
health services. I called the Department of Insurance, and they
admitted that they weren’t sure they knew what  they were supposed to
do, but that the companies that contract with HCG would then be
subject to such onerous requirements for reserves and audits that
they would simply quit working with HCG, in effect shutting HCG down
entirely.

I had spent most of the previous week planning the form of the
debate, which involved distributing testimonial emails from HCG
members to be read into the record, speeches on behalf of HCG, and
lots of scripted questions.

The latter is in response to parliamentary procedure whereby each
member can only speak once on  behalf of a bill in COW, but you can
ask as many questions of other members as you want. And if asked, you
can answer as much as you want. So I had several other sympathetic
members ask me questions which illuminated different aspects of HCG
and why the bill would kill it.

This strategy worked quite well in getting the information to the
other members and to the media and the general public. We put the
Republicans on the defensive, and it was gratifying to see so many
members of the majority party expressing just how much they liked HCG
(sincerely or not), considering how many of them have been trying to
kill it for years for ideological reasons.

Then the Republicans started  asking me to yield to their questions,
and I managed to turn the tables on them. I particularly enjoyed a
questioning from Kirk Adams where he ended up arguing that headlines
on newspaper articles were more accurate than the articles
themselves, and then tried to name and then discredit a state
official of the Department of Insurance.