You can search for Senate and House bills with keywords and bill numbers on the left side of the page. Once you click on a bill, click on 'staff analysis' to find a fairly clear description of what the bill is intended to accomplish.
WARNING: Things can change quickly in Tallahassee. Only about one bill in four will become law, and many bills will be significantly altered over the next two months. Be sure and read the last action taken on a bill to find its present shape and condition when you are looking. Also, lawmakers routinely amend bills in the last days of the session. Often entire bills are amended onto another bill. The staff of a particular bill's sponsors can tell you what happened to it.External Links:
Online Sunshine The Florida Legislature's Web site and shows action on bills, bill language and biographical information about individual legislators.
The Florida Channel The Florida Channel's three streaming web video channels can be accessed at this site.
As our elected officials deal with health insurance reform, the consequences of millions of uninsured Floridians threatens the 2010 Florida legislative session.
The state of Florida faces a $3 billion budget shortfall, and Medicaid is one of the main reasons for it. More than one-quarter of the cash-strapped $66 billion state budget now goes to Medicaid, and the cost is rising so fast that within a decade more than one-third of the budget will go to cover medical care for the poor and disabled, according to a House analysis.
The immediate problem facing lawmakers is that the economic recession has swelled the Medicaid rolls to 2.7 million Floridians creating more than an $800 million deficit that will have to be made up in the new budget. Additionally, nearly another $1 billion in federal Medicaid funding remains in doubt next year, awaiting congressional action to extend the extra money through June 2011. Yet, at the same time costs in the $18 billion Medicaid program is on the up, This fact proves Florida's health-care services are grossly inadequate for some of the state's most vulnerable citizens.
Florida’s Medicaid dental care for children, less than a quarter of the Medicaid-eligible children received care, short of the 38 percent national average. A study cited a shortage of 750 dentists to serve the children, one of the highest deficits in the nation. One of the reasons for the lack of dental care and other Medicaid services is the state's low reimbursement rates for physicians. Those fees are now the subjects of a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Miami.
Besides all this, lawmakers could cut back some of the services this spring. Most of the debate will focus on the so-called "optional" services, which the state provides but are not required by federal Medicaid regulations. One of the largest optional services is a prescription drug, something that lawmakers have never seriously talked about eliminating. They have also debated the need for other services, including chiropractic care, dentures, hearing aids, hospice care for the dying, mental health services and kidney dialysis. House and Senate leaders say that real-life impacts will give serious consideration in the Medicaid debate.
Aside from the potential service cuts, the more significant Medicaid debate this spring will be over whether the state should begin expanding its Medicaid pilot programs. Those now operate in five counties. Expanding them to the rest of Florida's counties would essentially mean moving more Medicaid clients from a traditional fee-for-service system into managed care run by HMOs, which proponents argue can save money.
The Agency for Health Care Administration, which oversees Florida's Medicaid program, has prepared a plan to transfer 375,000 Medicaid clients into HMOs in 19 counties. It would reduce Medicaid costs by a projected $58 million and result in savings of $22.5 million in state funding.
The more we learn about new driver's license-documentation requirements, the less there is to like. The law is controversial and many states have rejected it as too costly to implement. Florida where some of the Sept. 11, 2001 attackers got driver’s licenses is among the first states to comply.
The difficulties that people (especially elderly people) face in meeting the requirements as they try to renew or update their license has brought attention to even more problems with the rules. For instance, married women and widows are at a disadvantage, simply because their names are no longer the same as what is on their birth certificate. Many need to bring official marriage licenses when they go to the driver's license agency. So if your name has changed because of marriage or divorce, you must provide certified copies proving it.
This confusing bureaucratic overkill was perpetrated by Congress' 2005 REAL ID act, being phased in now. Approved in the name of homeland security and fraud protection, the legislation has long raised nationwide concerns over its cost, its potential threat to privacy and uncertainties about database sharing among the 50 states. Licensing agencies also warned that the stricter document requirements would cause paperwork delays and customer inconvenience. In Florida, the tougher document requirements took effect on Jan. 1st is instigating a tide of complaints and frustration. The rules defy simple explanation. A state Web site www.gathergoget.comwas set up to help clarify the requirements, but it is inadequate. Besides, people without computers don't have access to it. ONLY CERTAIN PROOF IS ACCEPTABLE Basically, the requirements affect those who renew or update their driver's license in person. (Not everyone must go to a license office. The state allows people younger than 79 a one-time option to renew by mail or online.) Even if they already have a driver's license, a Floridian renewing in person must bring proof of a: - Social Security number or one of these to prove your social security number: W-2 form; paycheck; or any 1099 form. - Primary identification, a certified U.S. birth certificate (hospital birth certificates are not accepted); -Current passport, consular report of birth abroad, or certificate of naturalization (Form N-550 or N-570); or certificate of citizenship (Form N-560 or N-561); - An existing license is no longer sufficient) and two papers showing current residential address. Only certain proof is acceptable, such as a mortgage statement or voter ID card, a recent utility bill, or a homeowners/auto insurance policy - a limitation that sends many people scrambling for certified copies of vital records. If the person's name has changed, more documents are required. 'REAL ID IS UNREALISTIC' What stands out in these and other cases is a sense that the rules are targeting the wrong people, punishing law-abiding citizens with a lot of paperwork and requirements. That is not what the public thought it was getting with the REAL ID act. The change was supposed to make life safer, but it seems to make life harder for everyday people. Ultimately, the process that is supposed to make us all safer is making many citizens angry. The law has been so controversial that "half the states have taken some kind of legislative stand against REAL ID and more have expressed serious reservations," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee last July. "Simply put, REAL ID is unrealistic," she said. "The REAL ID Act is unlikely to be implemented by the states as Congress intended, and a new approach is needed if we are to accomplish the law's goals." Napolitano favors new legislation (dubbed PASS ID) that would give states more flexibility. However, critics, including the Center for Immigration Studies, charge that PASS ID would damage efforts to ensure driver's license authenticity. Clearly, the nation needs safeguards so that official IDs are not turned into tools for abetting terrorism, crime, dangerous drivers and illegal immigration. But a law is fatally flawed when it imposes burdensome, frustrating requirements on people who already have a license and have used it in good faith for decades. If you are going to renew, plan ahead, call the office to find out what you need, then write your congressman. Tell him to fix this mess. One last bit of information, those who make it through this document ordeal become ID-compliant and get a tiny gold star on their licenses. At some point, this will be needed to go into a federal building or to board a commercial airliner. You may be able to renew a Class E license up to 18 months before the expiration date. Please check www.gathergoget.com
It has been six years since Congress added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, Democrats in the House and Senate are determined to make a change that they and most older Americans have wanted all along: getting rid of a situation that forces millions of elderly patients with especially high expenses for medicine to pay for much of it on their own.
The closing of the unusual gap in Medicare drug coverage, a gap that Republicans had, when they controlled Capitol Hill and the White House, insisted was needed for the government to be able to afford the program, would "forever end this indefensible injustice for American's seniors," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., said in announcing that the Senate would join the House in supporting the change.
The Democrats and President Obama have been clear that the "doughnut hole," as the gap is known, would disappear gradually over the next 10 years. They have not mentioned that Medicare patients would, according to House figures, face a slightly larger hole in coverage during two of the next three years than they do today.
Proponents say the government can afford to eliminate the gap because the pharmaceutical industry would pay for the phase out. But less than half of the $80 billion that drug makers agreed to provide, under a health-care reform agreement over the summer with Senate Democrats and the White House, would be used to help fill the gap, according to Senate Democratic aides. Moreover, there are no budget forecasts far enough into the future to show how much the expanded drug benefit would cost the government once the gap is fully closed.
Despite such uncertainties, the prospect of filling the hole in drug coverage responds to a strong desire among older Americans - a significant constituency that tends to be wary of changes to the health-care system. The 2003 law that added the drug benefit to Medicare was the largest expansion since the creation of the federal health insurance system for the elderly four decades ago.
As an example a retired nurse in Massachusetts, who has heart disease and diabetes and has had five small strokes, takes 16 prescription drugs. She is 59, six years younger than the typical age to join Medicare, and is eligible because her health problems have classified her as disabled. She's entered the doughnut hole each year, last year in May. At that point, her Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan stopped paying 75 percent of her medicine's price. Since then, she has spent $2,206 on drugs. After working all her life, saving with an IRA and purchasing a home, she had hoped to save the long term disability checks she gets from her former job for her old age. Instead, she spends them on medicine.
Under the health-care bill the House passed in November, people who reach the doughnut hole would be $500 better off next year than they would otherwise. But the impact over the next few years would be subtler than it appears at first for two reasons: The gap, without any change, is scheduled to expand each year, and the bill would fill it gradually. As a result, patients would face a larger coverage hole in 2011 and 2012 than this year, according to Ways and Means Committee data. After that, it would shrink more rapidly and disappear in 2019.
The just-passed Senate measure would narrow the gap halfway. Even before the bill was approved, Reid and the chairman of the two Senate committees that handle health-care issues said they would accept the House's goal of closing the hole completely.
Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits. Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Some may call them the new poor, people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives, and quite possibly for years to come. Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment checks before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department. For the record, 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s. Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But women have the unfortunate distinction of being among a group, women from 45 to 64 years of age whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly. In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent. Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different, as it might make this especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives. Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years. Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed. Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce particularly for older, less-educated people who may have only a high school diploma. Institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll, increasingly own large companies. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000, the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks. American business is about maximizing shareholder value, they really don’t want workers, they would rather hire the least they can, outsource as much as they can, and pay themselves bonuses and the shareholders dividends. During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, during expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually. The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each decade and there is no indication that this pattern is about to change. Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington. After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring. Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million. It was a jobless recovery, Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say. Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession, automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn. At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs. All of which helps explain why those who have never before struggled to find work feel a familiar pain each time they scan job listings on the computer, there are positions in jobs that require experience that most do not have, others require the use of computers with software that they have never used, while the jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants. If the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested. The system is not prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment, by adding to the recession, we will have added to this crisis. Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s. On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest have either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply. Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks. Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three.
People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills will be the New Poor.
U.S. consumers will get long-awaited relief from some of the most costly and deceptive credit card tactics when the sweeping provisions of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 has finally took place on February 22, 2010
The CARD Act, which President Barack Obama signed May 22, dramatically changes the way card issuers can profit from plastic.
Instead of arbitrary rate increases, exorbitant fees and murky calculations of interest charges, card companies must now be more transparent in establishing and disclosing the terms of their offerings, and, as a result, more prudent in the way they manage credit risk.
In response to the law, most issuers already have introduced a host of new fees and rate structures to recoup some of the revenue they will lose under the new rules. The changes will make credit not only harder to get, but also more expensive.
For example, 35 percent of the card offers mailed to U.S. households in the fourth quarter of last year carried annual fees. That's the highest percentage in 10 years, according to the marketing research firm Synovate. Those offers had an average annual interest rate of 13.5 percent, the highest in five years.
The CARD Act won't silence all consumer gripes about credit cards, but it will save cardholders billions of dollars and usher in, for many, a welcome new era of tougher industry scrutiny from lawmakers, regulators, consumer advocates and customers.
The first phase of the law took effect last August. It required card issuers to provide 45 days' notice on interest rate increases and that billing statements be mailed at least 21 days before their due dates in order for late fees to be applied.
The new changes are much stronger. With the exception of cards that have variable interest rates, the new rules ban rate hikes on existing balances unless the cardholder is at least 60 days past due.
If delinquent cardholders pay on time for six straight months, the law requires that their higher penalty rates be lowered to their previous interest rates.
It's important to note, however, that lenders can still impose universal defaults and other penalty rate increases on new purchases. The CARD Act exempts only existing balances from such increases.
The new rules also require that card payments above the minimum monthly amounts go toward balances with the highest interest rates.
Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, 12773 Forest Hill Blvd., Suite 211, Wellington, Florida President, Tony Fransetta Telephone: 561-792-8799; fax: 561-792-8797
