Bill production heats up in Legislature

Well, the last two weeks, the bill production heated up with the bill count increasing significantly. Several were again simple cleanup bills. Some moved existing rules into statute so they would be easier to manage. Still others had significant import. 

House Bill 59, the Medical Ethics Defense Act, created statute that protects doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers from the untenable situation when they are forced to make hard decisions about obeying their conscience when dealing with some of the modern medical issues. This protection will extend to them refusing to remove healthy body parts from children and being able to give good advice to those who need the comfort of that kind of advice.

Another bill, H104, standardized language regarding agricultural buildings so that if you live in Owyhee County or Boundary County, your agricultural building will have the same permitting requirements.

One of the more difficult bills was H138, the Medicare expansion conditions bill. After a great number of phone calls, visits with health and welfare and querying of other officials who have been working on this for several years, it was deemed necessary to put into position some conditions which would both save the expansion program and yet make certain that it only reaches those that truly need it. 

This was necessary to preserve it financially as the cost has been escalating exponentially. Voters gave me a clear mandate to come to Boise to try to cut costs. In order to do that and preserve Medicaid for people who truly need it, Representative Jordan Redman put this bill forward to do that. It has the potential to continue to meet the needs of those who are truly in need and yet save the state between $109 million, and $163 million dollars.

Other bills of note coming up for vote were HJM 3, a House Joint Memorial which seeks to encourage the federal government to repeal the corporate transparency act which is a source of great consternation and confusion to many small business folks. A bill put forward by Representative Raymond, number H82, will amend the law to provide for payment of depredations claims for wolf destruction of livestock. That should come up for a vote Monday.

Finally, the hoped-for grocery tax repeal ended up being a grocery tax refund increase. Many people do not know that they can file for this even if they don’t file for state income taxes. So, if your income was less than that required for you to file a state income tax form, you should file for the grocery refund anyway. It increased from $120, to $155 per person.

To put that into perspective, a family of four would, on moderate grocery budget, spend approximately $1,300 per month on groceries. It was difficult for me to determine how much of that was food since most grocery budgets include cleaning supplies, paper supplies like paper towels and toilet paper, etc. Considered in total, that would be a yearly budget of $15,600. Claiming the $155 per person would yield a $620 refund which is about $316 shy of the actual sales tax paid. 

Again, if it was possible to remove the nonfood items from the budget it’s likely that the numbers would be closer. Nevertheless, those of us who saw that this is what we were going to be able to vote on this year elected to return the extra $420 per person to the taxpayers and look for an opportunity to do something better in the next session.

Currently in my legislative binder I have 22 bills that should come before us Monday, Feb. 17. I have read them all and have had my questions answered so I’m ready to go on those. Currently the greatest activity I’m seeing is on House Bill H135 which deals with welfare for illegal aliens. It’s not on the second reading yet but I will be studying it soon. With the plethora of emails I’m getting, I cannot answer each one individually. So, I’ve created a newsletter that I send out with answers to the questions people have for me. I have put out four newsletters so far and I’m a bit behind right now, I hope to catch up this coming week.

Rep. Cornel Rasor represents Bonner and Boundary counties in District 1. He can be reached at crasor@house.idaho.gov or by phone at 208-332-1185.