ATLANTA – Third-party companies that help set prescription drug prices would face tighter regulations under identical bills the Georgia House of Representatives and state Senate passed unanimously Monday.
Pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) negotiate between insurance companies and pharmacies to set drug prices.
But too often, PBMs hide behind unscrupulous practices that allow them to increase prices without sufficient oversight, said Rep. David Knight, R-Griffin.
Senate Bill 313, which cleared the state Senate in March, follows legislation the General Assembly passed last year to prevent PMS from steering patients to associated pharmacies with potentially higher costs.
The House amended this year’s bill as it went through the committee process to make it identical to House Bill 946, PBM legislation the House passed, also in March.
On Monday, Knight described the final product as a compromise between the various interested parties based on input from the Georgia Department of Community Health (DCH) and the governor’s office.
The compromise requires PBMs to provide greater transparency by publishing data on prescription prices online. The amended bill also gives the DCH authority over auditing drug prices affecting enrollees in Georgia’s Medicaid program and the health plan covering teachers and state employees.
“[This] will be the toughest PBM legislation in the nation,” Knight said. “We can finally bring transparency to drug pricing and give choice to our patients.”
Whichever of the two bills gains final passage from the legislature will go to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
Hemp farmers and sellers would need a license to possess the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana under legislation that passed the General Assembly on Monday.
House Bill 847 requires anyone cultivating, transporting or selling hemp to hold a license just like for other agricultural products. Anyone caught with hemp who does not have a proper license would face the same penalties as for marijuana possession in Georgia.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Corbett, R-Lake Park, follows passage last year of a measure that legalized the growing, processing and transport of hemp. It cleared the state Senate on Monday by a 34-13 vote with several Democratic lawmakers voting against it.
The hemp measure now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
States have rushed into the hemp business in recent years to take advantage of its many commercial uses, including the manufacture of rope, textiles and CBD oil used to treat a variety of illnesses.
But how to distinguish the leafy green substance from cannabis, which is illegal to possess, has tripped up law enforcement representatives and criminal justice reform advocates concerned about conducting traffic stops.
Corbett’s bill aims to clear up concerns over expensive testing of hemp during traffic stops by requiring official paperwork rather than forcing law enforcement agencies to test for THC, the chemical that produces a high that legally must be below a 3% content amount.
Penalties for violating the license requirements could include jail time and fines, depending on the amount of leafy-green substance being carried.
The bill also requires certain key participants in a hemp growing or research operation to submit to background checks and fingerprinting. Those participants include owners and other executive positions like chief operating officers and chief financial officers. It does not include farm, field or shift managers.
Licenses for hemp processors would require paying the state Department of Agriculture a permit fee of $25,000 for the first year and $50,000 for every year thereafter. College and university hemp researchers would also be added to the list of eligible licensees under the bill.
The fees will pay for the licensing and monitoring program run by the agriculture agency, said Sen. Tyler Harper, who pushed for the bill in the Senate.
Speaking from the Senate floor Monday, Harper framed hemp farming and processing as a boon for Georgia’s agriculture economy, with nine processors and 66 growers already approved by the state and more that have submitted applications.
“This is going to be a phenomenal industry for our state,” said Harper, R-Ocilla. “This is going to be a way for us to get it off the ground.”
ATLANTA – Third-party companies that help set prescription drug prices would face tighter regulations under legislation the Georgia House of Representatives passed unanimously Monday.
Pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) negotiate between insurance companies and pharmacies to set drug prices.
But too often, PBMs hide behind unscrupulous practices that allow them to increase prices without sufficient oversight, said Rep. David Knight, R-Griffin.
Senate Bill 313, which cleared the state Senate in March, follows legislation the General Assembly passed last year to prevent PMS from steering patients to associated pharmacies with potentially higher costs.
The House amended this year’s bill as it went through the committee process to make it identical to PBM legislation the House approved, also in March.
On Monday, Knight described the final product as a compromise between the various interested parties based on input from the Georgia Department of Community Health (DCH) and the governor’s office.
The compromise requires PBMs to provide greater transparency by publishing data on prescription prices online. The amended bill also gives the DCH authority over auditing drug prices affecting enrollees in Georgia’s Medicaid program and the health plan covering teachers and state employees.
“[This] will be the toughest PBM legislation in the nation,” Knight said. “We can finally bring transparency to drug pricing and give choice to our patients.”
The bill now goes back to the Senate to agree or disagree with the changes made by the House.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s third-lowest-in-the-nation tobacco tax would go from 37 cents a pack to $1.35 under legislation the Senate Finance Committee approved Friday.
If the bill makes it through the General Assembly, it would represent the culmination of years of effort by health-care groups to build support for raising the state’s tobacco tax.
What is finally helping the proposal gain support is the state’s financial situation. The full Senate passed a fiscal 2021 state budget earlier Friday with $2.6 billion in spending cuts forced upon lawmakers by the impact the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown of the economy has had on tax revenues.
In voting against the budget, minority Democrats complained that legislative leaders were refusing to consider revenue-raising measures that could help offset some of the cuts.
The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an Atlanta-based think tank that has consistently called for legislation increasing revenues, released a statement late Friday supporting the tobacco tax hike.
“Lifting the tobacco tax will simultaneously help our state fund critical priorities, such as health and education, and boost health outcomes,” said Danny Kanso, a GBPI policy analyst. “GBPI commends Chairman [Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome] and the Senate Finance Committee for their leadership in passing legislation that will generate several hundred million dollars per year by bringing our state’s abysmally low tobacco tax in line with the level assessed in most states across the nation.”
Raising the tobacco tax to $1.35 a pack would fall well short of the national average of $1.80 a pack, and Kanso suggested lawmakers consider that when the bill heads to the Senate floor.
But the legislation faces an uphill battle in the Georgia House of Representatives.
“I’m not a tax increaser, particularly during this [economic] climate we’re in,” House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, said earlier this week.
Ralston also is skeptical about another effort by Hufstetler’s committee to free up more tax revenue. The Senate Finance panel passed a bill Thursday that would eliminate a series of tax breaks the state offers to lure businesses to Georgia.
The speaker argued that getting rid of such tax incentives would put a damper on economic development efforts that create jobs.
“This is not a good time to be killing jobs,” he said. We need to be about the business of growing jobs back.”
Thousands gathered outside the State Capitol to protest police brutality and racial injustice as lawmakers met for the 2020 legislative session on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Georgia Senate lawmakers advanced a bill late Friday that includes police officers and other first responders as protected classes in a contentious hate-crimes bill that has been propelled in recent weeks by a renewed push for police and court reform legislation in Georgia.
The measure, House Bill 426, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday night after being stalled there for more than a year, having gained a stamp of approval from the state House of Representatives in March of 2019.
A last-minute change added Friday in the committee saw first responders such as police officers, firefighters and EMS crews included alongside race, gender and religion as categories protected from acts of hate in Georgia.
Proponents of the change called it a needed support of support for police officers, justifying it as a safeguard for law enforcement officers that would balance legislation aimed at protecting many types of people.
“It is imperative that we support our law enforcement personnel that puts their life on the line for us just as we do these other classes, categories, groups of individuals,” said Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, who led the push for the change. “What I’m seeking is to be fair on both sides.
Opponents quickly condemned the move as a slap in the face for Black communities and other groups that have historically faced hateful and discriminatory crimes, including from police officers themselves.
They argued there should be a legal distinction between people who choose an occupation like law enforcement versus those whose inherent qualities like the color of their skin have subjected them to hateful acts.
“I really believed … that we were going to come out with one of the best hate-crimes [bills] in the country,” said Sen. Harold Jones II, R-Augusta, who led opposition to the change in committee. “And now, we’re not at that at all.”
Hate-crimes bill moves forward
Regardless of disagreement, the party-line approval vote by the Senate committee on Friday signaled movement in a bill that has been pushed since last March and which has risen to the top of the agenda for many state lawmakers in what remains of the 2020 legislative session.
The bill, by Rep. Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, would designate a hate crimes as an enhancement to charges that prosecutors would have the discretion to bring.
It specifies hate crimes as those targeting a victim based on “race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability or physical disability.”
Efstration’s measure has drawn support in recent weeks from state lawmakers from both parties, including House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, who urged the Senate to pass a “clean” version of the bill without any changes.
But in recent days, backers of the bill have watched with skepticism at the sudden arrival of a hastily drafted new hate-crimes measure, brought by Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan.
That measure proposed different protected classes than Efstration’s bill – including the addition of people exercising their free-speech rights and the removal of the term “gender” – and would have designated hate-crimes offenses as a standalone charge, not just an enhancement.
Senate Judiciary Committee members confer over House Bill 426, the hate-crimes measure, on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
‘Poison pill’
While none of Duncan’s proposals made it into the version that cleared committee Friday, several Democratic lawmakers decried the addition of protections for police offers as a potential deal-breaker for the bill’s final passage.
“That was a poison pill,” said Sen. Ed Harbison, D-Columbus, referring to the practice of adding certain language to a bill in order to kill it.
“This is certainly something that we cannot live with and we cannot support,” said Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, who is the General Assembly’s longest serving member.
“That was, in my opinion, a dark cloud over Georgia,” he added.
Sen. Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said she was “outraged and disgusted” by the addition, labeling it as especially offensive since it came on the Juneteenth holiday (June 19) celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the U.S.
Back the badge
Several Republican lawmakers praised the move Friday, citing examples of participants in recent nationwide protests who had destroyed police vehicles, threatened officers and blocked fire trucks from attending to burning businesses.
“I do know that there’s a history of assaults and assassinations on the men and women of law enforcement strictly because of their job,” said Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, who is a retired major with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Department.
“Not because they were investigating a crime,” he said, “but because they wear the uniform.”
Duncan also heaped praise on the bill, calling it a step forward to passing hate-crimes legislation despite the lack of provisions that his own measure outlined, such as data collections of hate-crime incidents and the ability to bring claims in civil court.
“In recent months, we’ve seen hate crimes against regular citizens, and we’ve seen hate crimes committed against first responders,” Duncan said after the vote Friday. “Neither are acceptable, and we will not tolerate it in our state.”
Protests prompt legislation
Meanwhile, the hearing on Efstration’s bill came hours after crowds gathered by the thousands outside the Capitol building and elsewhere in Atlanta to continue weekslong protesting over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks.
Their deaths, particularly Arbery’s in Georgia, spurred calls for speedy passage of the hate-crimes bill as lawmakers jump-started the 2020 legislative session this week.
The 25-year-old Arbery, who is black, was shot dead in February during a chase by two white men near Brunswick who suspected him of burglarizing a house under construction. Friends and family who knew Arbery say he was out for a jog that day.
His slaying prompted lawmakers to file bills this week to repeal Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, which critics have condemned as outdated and liable to shield dangerous vigilante citizens from prosecution.
Beyond that, more than a dozen bills focused on criminal justice reform have been filed in the General Assemble largely by Democratic lawmakers, who have seized on momentum to press for reform policies amid the recent protests.
Their proposals include repealing the state’s stand-your-ground law, prohibiting police officers from racial profiling, banning no-knock search warrants and punishing wayward district attorneys.
All eyes on hate-crimes bill
But the hallmark piece of legislation is Efstration’s hate-crimes bill, which top lawmakers from both parties want to wrap up before the session ends potentially next week.
They also want to avoid passing a hate-crimes bill this session only to have it tossed out in court for being too broad, as happened in 2004.
That year, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down a law enacted in 2000 after ruling it did not clearly specify what a hate crime is, such as whether it depended on a person’s race, gender or other identifiers.
Lately, a host of prominent business leaders and advocacy groups in Georgia have also urged swift passage of the bill with minimal fuss. Too much hand wringing could inspire a swell of protests levelled squarely at lawmakers, warned James Woodall, president of the Georgia NAACP.
“If we have to wait until January [2021] to get legislation that saves people’s lives, then so be it,” Woodall told lawmakers Thursday. “But I guarantee you, the people of Georgia will stand up. And we will state back the State Capitol.”
And while Ralston, the House speaker, has repeatedly called for passing Efstration’s bill, he has also thrown water on the chances for any other criminal justice reform measures to make headway this year.
“It’s important that we get through this session and do what we have to do,” Ralston said. “Then, we’ll take a look at all of those ideas.”
