Greetings,
The 2017 legislative session is officially underway. On Tuesday, I was sworn-in to serve my 4th term in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your representative again at the Capitol!
Tax Relief-Preserving Deductions for Minnesota Taxpayers
The legislature has many important issues to tackle this session due to it being a budget year and we have already gotten off to a fast start. On Thursday, the House passed House File 2, which conforms Minnesota tax code to the federal tax code, on a vote of 130-0. The financial result of this bill is $21.7 million in tax relief for 220,000 Minnesota tax filers. It was urgent to get this bill passed in the beginning of session to avoid any complications for Minnesotans filing their 2016 taxes this year. The Senate is expected to pass this bill as well. The bill will then be delivered to Governor Dayton for his consideration and signature before the Department of Revenue's deadline of January 11th.
House Attempts to Address Health Insurance Costs
Governor Dayton was correct last fall when he said that the Affordable Care Act is no longer “affordable.” This is why the House of Representatives moved quickly yesterday to attempt to take the bold step of trying to reduce health insurance costs and enact reforms to the health insurance market.
On Thursday, we made an effort to suspend the rules to take up House File 1: The 2017 Health Care Emergency Aid and Access bill. This bill consists of three key aspects: providing $300 million of premium relief for those Minnesotans who qualify on the individual market; ensuring continued access to doctors; and making individual market reforms, such as ending surprise billing, conforming with federal law to allow small businesses to offer a direct contribution toward health insurance premiums, and allowing for-profit health maintenance organizations (HMO) to enter the individual market.
The vote to suspend the rules was 75-55. Unfortunately, 90 votes are needed to suspend the rules, thus the motion failed. I had hoped that we were going to be able to pass this out of the House Thursday and bring it to conference committee with the Senate. I am disappointed that more members didn’t join us to vote in favor of this measure. As a result, we were unable to get millions of dollars in premium relief for folks struggling to pay health insurance costs and some good reforms for the insurance market this week. However, I am optimistic that we will be able to enact some long-term reforms and provide premium relief, but it looks like we will have to wait a little longer.
Committee Assignments
This session I am serving on the following committees:
- Government Operations and Elections Policy (Chair)
- Commerce and Regulatory Reform
- Veteran Affairs Division
- State Government Finance
- Rules and Legislative Administration
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Sincerely,
Tim