JACKSON, Miss. – The House of Representatives continued to tip-toe toward a Medicaid solution during the fourth week of the 2005 Regular Session. The House Medicaid Committee and the House Appropriations Committee both approved HB 1104, which is designed to save almost $44 million in the current FY 2005 and an additional $176 million in FY 2006. The expected savings would be generated though a variety of cost-cutting measures, some of which are controversial, and most of which will be painful for Medicaid recipients and health-care providers.

HB 1104's most prominent cost-cutting proposals include reducing from 30 to 15 the number of inpatient hospital days paid for Medicaid recipients per year and reducing from 6 to 3 the number of covered emergency room visits, eliminating upper income hospice coverage, significantly reducing pharmaceutical benefits, altering the method for determining physician rates, increasing bed assessments for hospitals and nursing facilities, and a variety of administrative adjustments and modifications, including requiring pre-authorization for all outpatient therapy. Senate counterparts also were working on Medicaid reform this week, with the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee approving SB 2745 which, much like HB 1104, would impose much-needed spending restraints upon the seemingly uncontrolled growth of the state’s burgeoning Medicaid program.

The political fly in the ointment, however, is the overt linkage of any progress on the Medicaid funding issue to the House leadership’s desire to raise taxes. During the first week of the 2005 Session, a proposal to raise Mississippi’s cigarette tax to a total of $1.18 per-pack (a $1.00 increase), ostensibly to help fund Medicaid, was defeated in the House by a vote of 59 for and 54 against, with 72 (a 3/5 majority) being required for passage. Following its initial defeat, the cigarette tax bill, HB 410, was held on a motion to reconsider, and procedurally may be brought back to the floor for yet another vote at any time before the February 24 deadline.

The reality, of course, is that even if a resurrected, now "cut-in-half" HB 410 were to barely scrap by in the House, the bill surely would meet an early death regardless, because the Senate leadership, unlike that of the House, strongly opposes raising taxes. Furthermore, no lawmaker of either party in either chamber seriously expects there ever to be enough support for the cigarette tax to garner the 2/3 vote which would be necessary in both the House and the Senate in order to override the veto that Governor Haley Barbour has pledged to impose in the unlikely event that HB 410 should ever reach his desk. Tying the assuredly doomed cigarette tax hike bill to the progress of seriously-needed Medicaid spending reductions therefore would seem to be a recipe for further frustration and delay, smacking more of political maneuver than of purposeful policy planning.

Most of the action this week in the House of Representatives came at the committee level, not only on Medicaid, but on general (non-revenue) bills and constitutional amendments, all of which will die if not reported out of the respective committees to which they have been assigned not later than the February 1 deadline for doing so. The next important deadline, for initial floor action on the general bills which survive the committee process, is February 10. Click the following link to see all important legislative deadlines applicable to the 2005 Regular Session.

Among the bills passing out of committees and placed on the House Calendar for further action by the full House were: HB 1313 to name a major equine facility at the State Fairgrounds in honor of the late Governor Kirk Fordice, also an ardent horse show supporter, who died last year; HB 984 to require local government officials to file economic interest reports with the State Ethics Commission in the same manner as legislators already are required to do; HB 653 to allow the State Department of Public Safety to release, for a fee, information about wrecked and salvaged motor vehicles to law agencies and consumers; HB 722 to raise the statutory minimum for motor vehicle liability insurance coverage in any one accident, with the rate depending on whether a death, bodily injury or vehicle damage occurs; HB 734 to require inspections for tinted vehicle windows to ensure they meet safety and law enforcement standards set in law; HB 1041 to require an additional fee for the issuance of a commercial driver’s license to operate a carrier of hazardous material; and HB 748 to require K-12 schools with vending machines to sell only healthy products such as milk, water, juices and whole-grain snacks.

Also passing out of committee were: HB 1058 to punish adults who permit minors to be present when illegal drugs are manufactured or distributed; HB 6 to overhaul the state’s juvenile justice system by creating a new agency to handle its operations; HB 1057 which increases penalties imposed upon unlicenced real estate agents; HB 1470 to clarify disclosure requirements for nonmaterial factors in real estate transactions; HB 704 to require the labeling of shrimp’s origin and to permit the use of the term "gulf shrimp" only for those shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico or in the Mississippi Sound; and HB 904 to allow state institutions to offer gaming-related courses to train existing and potential casino personnel.

Although committee action dominated the week, there were some bills passed by the full House of Representatives and sent to the Senate for consideration. Among bills approved by the full House this week were: HB 698 to re-enact until 2009 the State Department of Human Services, operated the past year under executive order; HB 1345 allowing the State Parole Board to place offenders in the intensive supervision program (also known as "house arrest") and to raise the offenders’ monthly fee to participate in ISP from $50 to $75; HB 1066 to allow the use in any election of "direct recording electronic voting equipment," which means a computer-driven unit for casting and counting votes on which an elector touches a video screen or a button adjacent to a video screen in order to cast his or her vote;  HB 524 to clarify that in order to decide whether a person pays out-of-state or in-state tuition for attendance at universities or community colleges, the residence of someone under 21 is that of the father, the mother, or a general guardian duly appointed by a proper court in Mississippi; and HR 13, a resolution declaring January 27 as a day of solemn remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where almost 1.2 million people died at the hands of the wicked Nazi German regime.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Most of the facts and much of the organization of the above summary is due to the fine work of Mac Gordon, of the House Information Office. However, although Mr. Gordon provides this information weekly to all House members, each member has the privilege of using it however he or she sees fit. Rep. Snowden has taken the liberty to re-write much of the standard summary, and to include his own comments and expressions of opinion. Accordingly, while Rep. Snowden gratefully acknowledges the work of the House Information Office in organizing and supplying reliable and timely information as to the workings of the House, all comment and all opinion contained in this summary is that of Rep. Snowden alone, and not that of Mr. Gordon or any other staff employee of the House of Representatives.