The Freedom of Access bill received a chilly reception in the Civil Law Committee today. They heard a lot of testimony from doctors and the Medical Board in the morning session telling us how dangerous it is to have "ill-trained and unlicensed practitioners" attending to the consumer's health care needs. As ludicrous as some of their arguments sound to some of us, the committee members are being swayed by these arguments. We need to quickly counter with our own point of view by next Monday, Feb. 14, in order to keep HF537 alive!
In the evening session, several amendments were proposed (mostly by Rep. Phil Carruthers). The intention of these amendments is to cripple HF537 in its present form and replace it with a creeping series of licensure proposals. This would include licensing naturapaths, homeopaths (though only M.D.s would be allowed to practice it), and massage therapists. Imagine, Freedom of Access being morphed into the Massage Licensing bill we're fighting against -- how ironic!
Rather than voting on the amendments tonight (the whole committee seems confused about what they are voting on anymore), HF537 was "laid over" until the Feb. 14th meeting at 10:00 AM. This gives us a bonus week to contact the members! Rep.s Sherry Broecker and Mary Liz Holmberg should be focused on, since they are currently "on the fence" and looking for a good excuse to vote yes. But contact everyone, if you can.
The Senate Health and Family Security Committee (HFS) will take up both Freedom of Access (called SF689 in the Senate) and Massage Licensure (SF1042) in their Tuesday, Feb. 8 meeting at 10:00 AM. The meeting room is Room 15 Capitol (not the State Office Building). Attend if you can and start contacting HFS members right away. This is a crucial hearing for both bills.
Freedom of Access (SF689) and Massage Licensure (SF1042) were both introduced in the Senate Health and Family Security Committee this morning. This was a brief author's presentation with about 20 minutes of pro and con testimony for each bill. Senators were given the chance to ask questions of the authors. They did not vote on the bills today, in order to give senators time to study the bills. I'd expect a vote will probably come when the committee meets next week.
In order to have your letters and phone calls noticed before the next meeting, please contact the HFS members this week.
It's possible SF1042 will be heard in the Senate Health and Family Security meeting, Thursday Feb. 17, 10:00 AM, Room 15 of the Capital Building. No definitive word yet if it's on the agenda. Don't forget to make your voice heard about Massage Registration!
A common theme the last two days has been our opponent's representation of the Freedom Of Access bill as an attempt to protect "unscrupulous practitioners" who are endangering the consumer. Lost in the discussion is the main reason for the bill, to protect the consumers and their right to choose in health matters. When you write committee members, please emphasize that this is a consumer protection issue, that it safe-guards the public's right to pursue any healing modality they desire, instead of being locked into the one, true medical system. Many committee members feel the consumers don't care about natural health care issues (because they haven't heard from consumers -- us!), in which case they will gladly listen to the medical lobby. (After two days of their testimony -- it isn't pretty...)
Tell them your stories of how natural healing has helped you (some members are "old thinking" still and don't know that there's good healing without doctors and hospitals). Let them know you value alternative therapies and products -- and use them frequently.
As a secondary theme, point out that boards and bureaucracies and artificial educational standards do not create good healers automatically. There are better ways to serve the public interest than the regulation model our legislators are used to working with. In fact, by restricting the practice of healing to just licensed medical doctors (and other licensed professionals), the consumer winds up having less choice available and at a higher cost. Natural healing is important because it provides good health services at an affordable cost -- and it works!
In short, we dropped the ball here, especially in Civil Law, by not writing them before the bills came to committee. They don't know that consumers are behind this bill, which makes it sound like a "special interests issue" for natural health practitioners. We need to correct this impression with a loud voice immediately.
Civil Law meets again on Monday morning, Feb. 14 -- write by this Friday!
Freedom of Access survived an onslaught of amendments (about a dozen, by my count) without being seriously undermined. There were a large number of amendments by Rep. Phil Carruthers, including a pair of "delete all" amendments (called DE4 and DE5), that would have totally rewritten the bill and turned it into a restrictive licensure bill. Most of the proposed amendments reflect the view of certain committee members that consumers need to be protected from natural health practitioners and that the practitioners need to be more strictly policed by the state.
The list of concerns is pretty long and I'm sure I missed a few (the meeting was pretty hard to follow today, even for committee members). Some of the highlights:
The delete all amendments were both defeated, though the vote that killed DE4 was an 8-8 tie. These close vote margins suggest the margin of support in the committee is razor thin.
Finally, Rep. Knoblach motioned to "lay over" the final committee vote on HF537 as amended until a future meeting. No date was set, being left up to the discretion of the chairman, Rep. Steve Smith. My sources suggested this was a tactical move, since it wasn't certain we had the votes at this time.
So, we're still in play (with a few bumps and bruises) and we've been given some extra time to lobby Civil Law. Keep up the pressure -- let them know consumers want this bill!
The Senate Health and Family Security committee will have a hearing (and possibly a vote) on the Massage Registration bill, SF1042 on Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 10:00 AM. The meeting is in Room 15 of the Capitol. Last chance to contact HFS members before this hearing!
There's no action this week on the Freedom of Access bill (HF537) in the House Civil Law committee. HF537 is currently "laid over" to a future meeting.
When I called Senator Hottinger's office this morning to voice my opposition to SF1042, I was told the bill had been pulled from the agenda and was not rescheduled. When I checked one of my main sources, I heard the bill is no longer being considered in 2000. Apparently, Rep. Fran Bradley (chairman of the House Health and Human Services) and Rep. Lynda Boudreau (also of HHS, chief author of HF537) informed Sen. Sheila Kiscaden (HFS) that HHS would not hear the Massage BIll this session in the House. The Senate is busy enough this year, so they decided to drop SF1042 from further consideration. So stand down from Red Alert on this one!
Please continue to support Freedom of Access (HF537) in the House Civil Law committee, where we still face an uphill battle. If we can get HF537 to pass this year, it would make the Massage Bill a moot point. It would be nice to not face "son of son of son of massage licensure" in 2001! Keep up the effort!
Civil Law will hear the Freedom of Access Bill (HF537) on Saturday, Feb. 26. Meeting time is 10:00 AM in the Basement Hearing Room of the State Office Building (usual place). This meeting will likely be the final and decisive vote on the bill in Civil Law -- it's a "must win" situation for us! I don't have details yet, but there may be some last minute amendments (called DE6) to placate opponents of the bill on the committee. I'll pass on information as it becomes available.
So, pass the word to all interested parties, contact Civil Law heavily (but politely) the next few days, and show up at the meeting on Saturday if you can.
When we walked into the Feb. 26th Civil Law meeting, the Freedom of Access bill (HF537) had been given 20 minutes of a very busy agenda to conclude our hearings. Chairman Steve Smith was determined to carry HF537 to a successful vote today, however, and gave more than half of the 3 hour meeting to our bill, bumping several other bills off the agenda and into next week.
The version of HF537 on the table today was the DE6 version (another rewrite of the bill to accommodate Civil Law members' concerns) and 2 amendments, A18 and A19. DE6 sought to bring the Freedom of Access bill more in line with the existing unlicensed mental health provider model that's already on the books. A19 was a collection of small technical amendments by Rep. Dave Bishop. A18 was a group of proposals by Rep. Phil Carruthers to weaken the bill and add extra restrictions on natural care practitioners.
A19 passed easily with light-hearted debate, mostly over semantics of certain clauses of the bill. A18 was a different matter altogether. Discussion was heated and often so convoluted that it was hard to follow. Instead of allowing second level amendments to the original Carruthers' A18 (as Rep. Jim Knoblach started to do), Chairman Smith offered to break up A18 into a series of individual parts and vote on each part separately. There followed a long series of debates and votes:
After all that, the DE6 version as amended of HF537 was quickly passed, resulting in loud applause from the gallery.
(Note: DE6 is very different from the bill summary I gave elsewhere. Maybe I'll get around to an updated summary sometime.)
So where are we now? Rep. Boudreau feels that HF537 has changed so much since 1999 that it needs to be refered back to House Health and Human Services (HHS) to be heard a second time. Timing is a problem, since we have until Friday, March 3rd to pass the HHS-Policy committee, due to a legislative cut-off date in effect for all "policy" committees. We need to contact HHS immediately, especially Chairman Fran Bradley, and get them to schedule a hearing on HF537 next week and vote in favor.
The House Health and Human Services-Finance committee (which handles the financial appropriations for the bill, namely money to the Dept. of Health to police natural health care practitioners) will also need to vote on the bill, though they have more time. We will not have to visit the Crime Prevention committee, as previously thought. And that's just the House! There's still a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.
In the Senate, the companion bill for Freedom of Access is SF689. The same March 3rd deadline on "policy" committees applies to the Senate Health and Family Security (HFS) committee that is hearing SF689. They have had one short hearing on the bill on Feb. 8, so it will be quite a "rush job" to finish the work in HFS. Contact HFS right away!
So celebrate the victory, congratulate the Civil Law members for their hard work, and get focused on the next step in HHS and HFS. The lists of HHS committee members and HFS members to contact are waiting for you.
On Feb. 28, I checked the web pages for the Senate Health and Family Security committee, to look at it's weekly agenda. I followed up with a quick phone call to Sen. John Hottinger's office. SF1042, the massage registration bill, is on the Feb. 29, 10:00 am meeting agenda! The staff person I talked with said the bill was scheduled for a vote, with no hearing or testimony. That's all the facts that any of us have been able to dig up so far, but considering this bill was "dead" last week, a lot of us are quite alarmed and confused.
One possibility is the bill is on the agenda in order to be officially withdrawn. But it's also possible HFS could try to pass the bill -- we simply don't know at this point! It's highly unusual to vote on a bill without giving it a public hearing with testimony, which is why the "withdrawal" scenario sounds plausible. We'll keep you posted as this story develops. If you contact HFS members, let them know (respectfully, don't go ballistic) that this sounds irregular and has raised some eyebrows -- and that you still oppose SF1042. The voting public (us) deserves a clarification. So, until the dust settles, back to Red Alert!
No news on getting a hearing for Freedom of Access in the House Health and Human Services committee this week. Diane Miller, the MNHC lawyer, hinted that a Wed. or Thurs. timeslot was possible, but not confirmed. So we need to pressure HHS to pass HF537 by Friday, March 3 -- the "first deadline" for bills in Policy committees.
Should HHS pass Freedom of Access this week, we get a one week extension in the Senate HFS committee. The "second deadline" of Friday, March 10 applies to policy bills in one side of the legislature when the companion bill on the other side passed by the first deadline. Apparently, the Senate is waiting to see what the House does this week before looking at the bill. So House action now buys us a week in the Senate. In short, contact both committees very heavily this week and next!
First, we lost the Massage Bill vote in the Senate HFS committee this morning. The senators heard few opposition voices the last week and passed SF1042 with only 3 dissenting votes. The bill moves on to the Senate Government Operations ("Gov Ops") for a hearing and vote on Thursday, Mar. 2, starting at 12:00 noon to 1:45 PM, with a evening session starting at 6:00 PM. Gov Ops meets in Room 15 of the Capitol. The Senate Commerce committee is also expected to take up SF1042 this week -- no meeting time is known at this time. Let's stop this nonsense!
Freedom of Access (HF537) is up for a hearing in the House Health and Human Services (HHS) committee Wed., Mar. 1 at 6:00 PM, Room SOB-10. Time for a last minute effort here! Don't forget that the companion bill, SF689, needs to pass the Senate HFS committee before next Friday. There may be some other committees we don't know about yet.
In short, we've got a battle on 4 fronts right now and only a few days to make a difference.
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