Lawmakers decide which bills worth negotiating and kill the rest
On a day when the House and Senate created negotiating committees to try and salvage 50 bills, they voted to summarily kill about 15 others after concluding that compromise was unlikely to be reached on them.
A major reform bill (SB 297) that hit the cutting room floor Thursday was the pitched battle between Secretary of State David Scanlan and HealthTrust, the state's largest risk pool, over whether Scanlan should get enhanced power to regulate these groups that manage insurance plans for units of government.
Last week, the House of Representatives rejected Scanlan's reforms in favor of an amendment that would have let the groups decide whether to come under the regulation of Scanlan's office or the Insurance Department.
Without debate, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Dan Innis, R-Bradford, asked the Senate to 'non-concur' on the House changes and the Senate did on a voice vote which killed the measure.
Scanlan said killing the bill made sense.
"I am pleased the Senate voted to non-concur on the House amended version of SB 297. What began as an attempt to improve the transparency and accountability of pooled risk organizations entrusted with $750 million taxpayer dollars became an attempt by one risk pool to move to a regulatory environment favorable to them without addressing the underlying concerns," Scanlan said in a statement.
Ivermectin bill rejected
The Senate also decided to reject out of hand a controversial House-passed proposal (SB 119) to allow any doctor or pharmacist to provide ivermectin to any patient without a prescription.
Ivermectin was created as a drug to treat parasites for animals but in the past decade it proved to be a prize-winning medication to treat humans for similar conditions.
During COVID-19, the drug became a viral sensation for many Americans who used it to respond to the virus.
House Democratic Floor Leader Lucy Weber of Walpole had argued against giving ivermectin the special status of having a 'standing order' for any patient.
She noted the only medications that have that designation are EpiPens that treat allergic reactions, smoking prevention drugs and some forms of contraception.
This was the main reason that former Gov. Chris Sununu gave when he vetoed a similar bill to this one.
Rep. Yuri Polozov, R-Hooksett, said he pursued the bill because during the pandemic many medical providers were ostracized or even sanctioned for prescribing ivermectin.
Many other bills were also killed because sections that legislators still wanted to survive had been tacked onto another bill.
In this case, the original bill the House amended to favor ivermectin was expected to save the state up to $9 million a year to allow health care providers to prescribe brand name drugs in the Medicaid program if they have discounts or rebates that make these medications cheaper to purchase.
The state Senate tacked that provision onto the trailer bill of its state budget.
In a similar vein, the Senate on Thursday killed a bill (SB 60) dealing with legalized gambling that would have taken from state regulators and given to the Legislature the authority to write rules regarding immunization requirements.
The House had already tacked that section onto the version of its own budget trailer bill.
Another bill (SB 100) that died Thursday was meant to alter a 2021 ban on teaching discrimination in public schools to respond to a federal judge's ruling that struck it down as unconstitutionally too vague.
The House-passed language would require a showing that the educator 'knowingly' was advocating bias in his or her teachings.
Some socially conservative groups that supported the law had warned lawmakers that the House bill only addressed a small part of the legal flaws with the existing law.
The Senate also rejected a House-passed bill that would have created a court docket to resolve disputes over so-called blockchain currencies such as bitcoin (SB 25).
klandrigan@unionleader.com
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