Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation Monday to toughen penalties for illegal street races by criminalizing promotions on social media and potentially confiscating cars.
The newly enacted measure makes it a misdemeanor for anyone in Georgia to organize, promote or participate in street racing, also called drag racing.
It will also require driver’s license suspensions for drag racers and cause drivers to face losing their vehicles unless the driver’s family would face financial hardship. In that case, the vehicle’s title would have to be transferred to another family member.
Kemp said the increased penalties would help curb a growing crime problem in metro Atlanta and show support for police agencies seeking to crack down on street racing.
“This illegal activity is very dangerous,” Kemp said at a bill-signing ceremony Monday. “Many people have been injured and some tragically have lost their lives. … Our goal is simple: To protect every family in every community.”
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Josh Bonner, R-Fayetteville, who is one of Kemp’s floor leaders in the state House of Representatives. It cleared both chambers in the General Assembly by wide margins during the 2021 legislative session.
Bonner’s bill faced some pushback from defense attorneys who questioned what difference the tougher penalties would make since local police already have a difficult time arresting drag racers. Opponents also worried someone could have their car confiscated if it was being used by another person for drag racing.
The measure Kemp signed Monday echoed a separate drag-racing bill sponsored by Sen. Emanuel Jones, D-Decatur, that did not pass during the session.
Co-sponsoring Bonner’s bill were Reps. Bill Hitchens, R-Rincon; Martin Momtahan, R-Dallas; John Corbett, R-Lake Park; and Matt Barton, R-Calhoun.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed several bills Monday to lower the age requirement for Georgia parents to adopt children from 25 to 21, create tuition waivers for foster kids to attend in-state universities and bolster legal protections for adopted children against abuse.
The six-bill package marked the latest move by Kemp and his allies in the General Assembly to cut red tape for Georgia families who wish to adopt children and help give older foster kids a leg up as they enter the working world.
During a bill-signing ceremony, Kemp highlighted improvements Georgia’s foster-care system has seen in recent years through an increase in adoptions that have reduced the number of foster kids in state care from about 15,000 children in March 2018 to roughly 12,000 as of this past January.
“By making it more affordable to adopt, reducing bureaucratic red tape and championing the safety of children across our state, we can ensure that Georgia’s children are placed in those homes in a secure and safer future for generations to come,” Kemp said Monday.
Legislative leaders including Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan backed legislation to lower the age for parents to adopt children to 21 and allow foster and homeless children to obtain tuition waivers from the University System of Georgia and the Technical College System of Georgia.
Kemp also signed legislation Monday to add more training for juvenile court officers, expand rules for parents under court-ordered alternatives care and require officials to report on a range of child-abuse treatment including abandonment, neglect, emotional abuse and exposure to chronic alcohol or drug use.
Additionally, Kemp signed bills to allow judges to issue arrest warrants for state foster-care workers, give courts more data on children in foster care and include a former foster child and current or former foster parents on the state Child Advocate Advisory Committee tasked with evaluating Georgia’s child-protective services.
Former state Rep. Burt Reeves, R-Marietta, one of Kemp’s floor leaders in the General Assembly who has pushed for adoption and foster-care legislation since 2015, said the newly signed bills add to other recent measures aimed at overhauling the foster-care system.
“Lives are being changed,” said Reeves, who resigned his seat in the state House of Representatives recently to take a job at Georgia Tech. “Forever homes are being created for children who have had the roughest and the most difficult pathway imaginable, and families are growing.”
Kemp signed separate legislation last month sponsored by Reeves to boost the annual tax credit for new foster parents from $2,000 to $6,000 annually for the first five years after adoption. He also signed a bill last year that prohibits foster parents from engaging in improper sexual behavior with children in their care, closing a loophole in state law.
Georgia lawmakers who joined Reeves in sponsoring the bills Kemp signed Monday included Sens. Chuck Payne, R-Dalton; Brian Strickland, R-McDonough; and Bo Hatchett, R-Cornelia; and Reps. Kasey Carpenter, R-Dalton; and Katie Dempsey, R-Rome.
Prescription-drug price negotiators are taking stock of new state laws that aim to clamp down on predatorial pharmaceutical practices that some companies worry could hamper efforts to lower medication costs in Georgia.
Patient advocates and representatives from groups called pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) contracted with health insurers to negotiate lower drug prices are awaiting data from new prescription-cost reporting required in legislation state lawmakers passed last year.
That legislation forces PBMs to start publicly reporting how close to a national average many health plans’ drug prices were negotiated. It also requires that PBMs give state officials some confidential information on rebates and other negotiating tools.
Some PBM representatives worry broader reporting could tie their bargaining hands as they push drug makers to lower costs once the Georgia legislation takes effect in July.
“It definitely affects our ability to watch the market and have those reimbursement rates be more closely aligned with the market,” said Leanne Gassaway, vice president of state government affairs at CVS Health. “I think it’ll take some time to see if those are drastic.”
PBMs have long been part of the complex web of drug manufacturers, insurers and pharmacies that produce, sell and dispense prescriptions in Georgia and across the U.S. They are supposed to act on behalf of patients to drive competition between drug makers and lower prescription costs.
But many pharmacy and patient advocates argue some PBMs in practice become cumbersome middlemen too cozy with pharmaceutical companies that often pocket large rebates and end up contributing to rising drug prices.
Georgia lawmakers have moved in recent years to curb many PBM negotiating practices that advocates consider harmful to patients, said Greg Reybold, vice president of public policy for the Georgia Pharmacy Association. He argued PBMs should face more transparency and reporting rules to keep them honest.
“It’s a mouse trap,” Reybold said. “And the more opaque it is, the more profitable it is for these actors.”
Reybold highlighted one practice known as spread pricing in which advocates say pharmacies are reimbursed less than what health plans pay PBMs for drugs. He pointed to a state report that found PBMs charged several Georgia Medicaid plans more than they reimbursed local pharmacies by roughly $89 million from July 2017 through July 2019.
Recent Georgia legislation aimed to restrict how PBMs can steer patients to certain drug brands, allow the state Department of Insurance to conduct financial and compliance audits of PBMs, and grow the amount pharmacies receive in cost-lowering rebates that drug makers send to PBMs for prescription purchases.
Reybold called those measures a “great start” to boost protections for patients against bad-actor PBMs but said lawmakers “can certainly go further,” particularly after Georgia’s new reporting requirements for PBMs kick in this later year that should paint a better picture of overall drug prices.
“[The reporting] for the first time is going to show that these are the drugs [PBMs] are reimbursing above national acquisition cost and these are the drugs [PBMs] are reimbursing below,” Reybold said.
But tying price reports to the so-called National Average Drug Acquisition Cost – which the recent Georgia legislation requires – could produce an incomplete view of how prescriptions are negotiated by leaving out other pricing benchmarks PBMs use as well as savings from rebates, said CVS Health’s Gassaway.
Some aspects of the new Georgia reporting rules could also force PBMs to show their cards more during the bargaining process, unintentionally decreasing chances to spur the kind of competition between drug makers that helps lower prices, Gassaway said.
Many PBMs already share information on prices and negotiating practices by companies such as CVS Health, which administers prescription-drug plans for Georgia’s state health plan and several Medicaid managed-care providers, Gassaway said. Opening up that information to more eyes could potentially do more harm than good, she said.
“We don’t believe having that kind of competitive information or proprietary price information out in the public domain would actually enhance competition or lower drug prices,” Gassaway said. “But we do believe in being transparent with our clients so they know where their money is going.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has also stressed PBMs’ ability to negotiate lower drug prices, adding extra pressure on top of Georgia’s legislation on reporting rules, Gassaway said. CVS Health released new findings Friday showing its commercial clients saw a 34% “negative trend” in drug spending last year.
The national PBM trade group Pharmaceutical Care Management Association estimates drug prices in Georgia could increase by $7.3 billion over the next decade due to last year’s legislation, arguing the reporting rules and other practice limits do not reduce the costs of prescription drugs.
“It’s unfortunate, especially for patients, that special interests like drug manufacturers and independent pharmacies backed the legislation, putting their profits before patient health,” said Greg Lopes, an assistant vice president for the association.
Amid concerns from some PBMs, Reybold said he does not buy arguments that Georgia’s recent legislation would lead to higher drug prices. He’s confident tighter reporting will pay dividends and keep many PBMs in better check.
“If they could keep everything trade-secreted, that’s what they will do,” Reybold said. “They’ve monetized every step of the way.”
President Joe Biden touts his first 100 days in office at a rally held in Duluth on April 29, 2021. (Official Biden Twitter video)
Marking his 100th day in office, President Joe Biden swung through metro Atlanta Thursday to highlight Georgia’s pivotal role in securing his election and easing passage of his legislative priorities.
Biden, the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry Georgia since 1992, spoke at a drive-in rally in Duluth where he pressed for support to hike taxes on high-wage earners and corporations, plus national legislation to curb some impacts from Georgia’s recent controversial voting law changes.
Biden was joined by First Lady Jill Biden and several Georgia leaders at the Duluth stop including U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, whose wins in January handed Democrats control of the White House and Congress.
“We owe special thanks to the people of Georgia,” the president said at Thursday’s rally. “Because of your two senators, the rest of America was able to get the help they deserved.”
The Bidens also paid a visit Thursday to former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, at their home in Plains. Carter was among many high-profile Georgia Democrats to endorse Biden in last year’s general election.
Georgia’s Republican-led election bill capped a wide-ranging speech Thursday that touched on the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout, emergency pandemic aid, a proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan and a child tax credit for lower and middle-class families that would be funded by higher taxes on the country’s wealthy.
Biden, who recently called the election bill “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” urged backing for two national measures that would reverse some changes to mail-in and early voting rules by broadening access to mail-in and early voting and reviving oversight provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“If we are truly to heal the soul of America … we need to protect the sacred right to vote,” Biden said. “Your vote changed the world, but instead of celebrating that, it’s being attacked.”
The Georgia bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed last month after party-line approval in the General Assembly, requires tighter absentee voter identification, empowers state officials to take over poor-performing county election boards, expands early-voting weekend hours and bans non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters waiting in line outside precincts.
Republicans have defended Georgia’s election bill as needed to boost confidence in Georgia’s election system amid former President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud, which state election officials and federal courts repeatedly rejected.
Kemp, who faces a possible rematch against Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2022, slammed the national voting legislation Democrats are now pushing as “an unconstitutional power grab.”
“This is their insane agenda, and they’re using lies, boycotts and cancel culture to ram it through,” Kemp said on social media Thursday. “I’ll continue to fight for secure, accessible elections.”
Biden also used his speech to tout the distribution of more than 220 million COVID-19 vaccines since his inauguration, passage last month of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package and new federal hate-crimes penalties that he touched on Wednesday night in his first address before a joint session of Congress.
Biden’s visit Thursday was his second trip to the Peach State since taking office. He appeared with Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta on March 19 to show support for the Asian-American community days after mass shootings at local spas killed eight people, mostly Asian-American women.
Recently enacted law changes for Georgia elections have become a lightening rod for national debate on voter integrity following the 2020 election cycle. (Photo by Beau Evans)
The State Election Board held its first meeting Wednesday since Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly removed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s voting powers on the board.
Georgia’s recent controversial election legislation changing mail-in and early-voting requirements included a new rule stripping the secretary of state’s chairmanship of the board and giving state lawmakers authority to appoint its chair.
Vice Chairwoman Rebecca Sullivan led Wednesday’s board meeting in Raffensperger’s stead amid complaints from the board’s sole Democrat, David Worley, who panned the Republican-pushed election legislation as “completely ignorant” and driven by refuted claims of voter fraud.
A new nonpartisan board chair has not yet been picked by the General Assembly or approved by Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the Republican-led elections bill in late March and has repeatedly touted the voting law changes as needed to bolster confidence in Georgia’s election system.
The elections bill, which passed along party lines last month, included dozens of rule changes such as tighter absentee voter identification, expands early-voting weekend hours and bans non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters waiting in line outside precincts.
It also empowers the state board to suspend and temporarily replace up to four county or city election officials at any given time who are found to be performing poorly, pending a formal hearing to decide on disciplinary recommendations from an outside review panel.
Opponents have viewed that rule change as a potential way for local or state officials upset about an election’s outcome to overturn the results, similar to how then-President Donald Trump pressured Raffensperger to reverse Trump’s losing vote tally in Georgia in the 2020 general election.
Worley slammed the rule change Wednesday and pledged to oppose any future efforts aimed at interfering with county and city election offices that the five-member board might take up.
Defenders of tighter state oversight of local elections activities have pointed to officials in several areas such as Fulton County, which faced criticism over long lines outside polling places and slow turnaround of results during the 2020 cycle.
