Cascade of Bills Out of Appropriations; Many Due for Floor Votes This Week August 19, 2014 Advocacy, Health Care Reform, News legislative update, SB 492 0 The Assembly and Senate appropriations committees last week approved hundreds of bills for floor votes, including dozens of health-related ones. Some of the bills impacting health care are: AB 2533 (Ammiano) and SB 964 (Hernandez) are aimed at ensuring health plans coverage is timely as well as adequate, and requires insurers to pay out-of-network charges for services they don't provide in a timely manner in-network. SB 18 (Leno) would require the Department of Health Care Services to accept a $6 million grant from the California Endowment. The state in May turned down that money -- and its matching $6 million in federal funding -- which is earmarked for Medi-Cal renewal and enrollment assistance. AB 1552 (Lowenthal) would make the Community Based Adult Services program an ongoing Medi-Cal benefit. CBAS is the program providing adult day health care services for frail and elderly Californians. SB 1052 (Torres) would require the board of Covered California to provide web links on the exchange website to health plans' drug formularies, and to create a search tool on the site for consumers to compare health plans' cost and coverage of particular drugs. SB 492 (Hernandez) was approved, but not before huge chunks of the bill were amended at the urging of CMA/SFMS. SB 492 originally intends to expand scope of practice for optometrists to allow scalpel and laser surgery. The newly amended bill limits optometrists to provide certificates of immunizations. The amended bill text has not yet been released. SB 1054 (Steinberg) brings back grants for the Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction program. Those grants are for counties that develop a cost-effective system of prevention, intervention and incarceration for mentally ill offenders. Source: California Healthline, August 18, 2014. Comments are closed.
