Rep. Garey Bies’ Latest “Notes from the West Wing… Cochlear Implant Legislation”
Posted on 23. Apr, 2009 by Garey Bies in News
Today on the floor of the State Assembly we considered Assembly Bill 16, which would require some health insurance policies and plans to cover the cost of hearing aids, cochlear implants, and related treatment for children.
I just wanted to provide a brief update to the district to let you know that I supported this legislation on the floor but not without some reservations. My main concern with the legislation is that it will only cover about 28% of Wisconsin’s children. You see, the authors of the legislation crafted the bill so that it only applies to:
- individual and group health insurance policies, including defined network plans,
- sickness care plans operated by a cooperative association and voluntary nonprofit sickness care plans,
- health care plans offered by the state to its employees and health care plans offered by the Group Insurance Board to local governments, including self-insured health plans, self-insured health plans of a county, city, village, town, or school district, and
- short term plans.
That is not right.
As legislators, it is our responsibility to continually work to make legislation better. And to that end, we offered an amendment that would have extended the coverage of this legislation to 100% of all Wisconsin children. Unfortunately, this amendment was defeated for, what I can only assume were political reasons. As your State Representative I still felt that providing this coverage to some of Wisconsin’s children was better than providing the coverage to none so I still voted for the bill, but I also have no defense for the legislation only providing coverage to a few. Our amendment would have made the bill better by providing the coverage to all children and it is unfortunate that it was defeated simply because it was authored by Republicans.
As always, I can be reached by e-mail at Rep.Bies@legis.wisconsin.gov or by telephone, toll-free at 888.482.0001. You can also visit my Website.
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