Fitzsimon File

Tuesday at the General Assembly had all the characteristics of the first full legislative day of crossover week. Non budget legislation that hasn’t passed either the House or Senate by Thursday is dead for the biennial session.

Long committee calendars were the norm, with lawmakers and advocates scrambling much of the day, finding it next to impossible to keep up with a pace reminiscent of a high school teenager with a term paper due in the morning that he just started late the night before.

The General Assembly has been in session four months. Many bills were introduced long ago and are just now being heard, the week of the crossover deadline.

There was good news Tuesday about one bill that has received a lot of attention, the proposal to require insurance companies to cover mental illness the same way they cover physical illnesses. Thirty-seven states already have such a parity law.

North Carolina doesn’t have one because the powerful lobbyists from insurance companies and business groups have crushed the legislation in the past, claiming that covering mental illness would force businesses to drop coverage for their employees altogether.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Rep. Martha Alexander, who has been fighting for 15 years to end discrimination against the mentally ill, the House Insurance Committee approved parity legislation Tuesday morning. It now goes to the House floor.

The committee did eliminate substance abuse from the legislation, which makes the victory somewhat bittersweet, but it is a victory nonetheless for people with mental illness and good for Rep. Alexander for her passion and persistence.

Lobbyists for Blue Cross Blue Shield still seemed in control of the debate from behind the scenes, never speaking publicly in the committee debates, but engineering the removal of substance abuse from the bill.

That came despite figures that show covering both mental illness and substance abuse would cost Blue Cross $27 million a year. The company has 3 million members, 500,000 of whom are not in self-insured plans and could be directly affected by the legislation.

If Blue Cross passed on the entire cost of parity to those policyholders and refused to dip into its billion dollar cash reserve or absorb some of the costs from its profits that last year were close to $200 million, (not bad for a nonprofit) it would mean roughly $50 a year more in insurance costs for policy holders 

Four dollars a month split between employers and the workers they cover to make sure people with mental illness or an addiction have access to help. And that does not take into account the savings for businesses providing the coverage from less sick days and having more productive employees.

Let’s hope the full House not only supports the latest version of the parity bill, but also considers the benefits of helping people struggling with substance abuse.

The debate so far reflects either that profits are trumping human decency or that lawmakers misunderstand the nature of the disease of addiction. Or both.

Misunderstanding doesn’t begin to describe the comments of House Minority Leader Paul Stam Tuesday in the debate on a proposal to require school systems to adopt tough policies on bullying and harassment based on a list of factors that include “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, physical appearance, sexual orientation, or mental, physical, or sensory disability.”

Stam tried to remove the reference to sexual orientation, at one point saying that the bill would protect pedophiles since pedophilia is an orientation too. Equating criminal behavior and a recognized mental disorder with being gay is not only offensive and inflammatory, it is factually wrong and surely Stam knows better than that.

Maybe not. He also posed a hypothetical situation for the committee, in which two 14 year-old boys were hurling insults at each other and one said he wanted to have sex with the other boy’s underage sister. Stam said if the boy with the sister punched the other boy, he should be given a medal, not punished for bullying.

That during the debate about reducing school violence.

Also Tuesday, news that legislation to raise the age to 18 at which youth are treated as  adults in the criminal justice system won’t be considered this session. That disturbing decision comes despite a recent national report that finds youth sent to the adult system are far more likely to commit another crime than teenagers dealt with by the juvenile system that focuses more on rehabilitation and counseling.

Senate Democrats are also balking at legislation to give kids a second chance. Reportedly, Senate leaders told the Democratic Caucus recently that legislation to expunge the records of some juvenile offenders might hurt Democrats’ reelection chances in 2008. Never mind the lives of the children.

A victory on ending discrimination against the mentally ill tempered by insurance company lobbyists flexing their muscle, unchallenged offensive speech by the House Minority Leader, and lawmakers putting politics ahead of helping children.

It is going to be a long week.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.