If SB 397 were an animal, you would have to classify it as a salmon, making its implausible way upstream against a preposterous current.
The state Capitol has gushed anti-Obamacare legislation this session. Republicans have damned the Affordable Care Act and government intervention in health care with an intensity that has been stunning in its breadth and imagination.
Just to name two efforts: Gov. Nathan Deal has green-lighted HB 990, the effort to chip away at executive branch authority by ceding to the Legislature the right to expand Medicaid rolls. HB 707 would bar even a city dogcatcher from referring anyone to a federal health care exchange.
It is in this climate that, by a vote of 51-0, the Republican-controlled Senate passed SB 397, which would require health insurance policies sold in Georgia to cover behavioral therapy for children 6 and under who have been diagnosed with autism. Thats right. A health insurance mandate.
Its the right thing to do for Georgias children, said Tim Golden, R-Valdosta, chairman of the same Senate Insurance Committee that is likely to pass out HB 707 today.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle has also placed his own prestige behind the autism coverage bill, testifying for it in committee the first time hes done so in his eight years as president of the Senate.
And Gov. Nathan Deal may have given his sotto voce endorsement. For the first time, the governors new budget includes extra cash to make sure insurance policies for state employees include treatment coverage for autism.
Golden and supporters of SB 397 say the bill has naught to do with Obamacare that the push for autism insurance coverage pre-dates the 2010 passage of the ACA. And this is true. Business interests opposed mandated autism coverage in Georgia even before Obamacare.
But the fact that the bill has gotten further than it ever has before, in a harsher climate, is well worth noting.
Its frustrating for us, because whether its a federal mandate or a state mandate, it ultimately costs our members in terms of higher premiums, said Kyle Jackson, the Georgia state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, one of two business groups actively fighting the bill.
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A bill to mandate insurance coverage for autism swims upstream at the Capitol