February 05, 2010 04:17 AM UTC

End of the Line for Roberts/Curry "Moratorium"

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

The Durango Herald foreshadowed yesterday:

State Rep. Ellen Roberts isn’t trying to pick on anyone with her health-insurance bill this year, she said.

But critics have targeted Roberts’ bill for an early death.

It faces long odds Thursday in its first committee hearing, but Roberts will argue her bill is necessary to keep insurance costs down for everyone.

House Bill 1154 would forbid the Legislature from putting new mandates on health-insurance companies for a year. That would squeeze out bills to require coverage for birth-control and pregnancy services, chemotherapy and autism disorders.

The trouble, Roberts said, is that insurance costs for everyone rise when patients make emotional testimony before the Legislature and force insurance companies to cover their diseases… [Pols emphasis]

HB 1154 has its first hearing Thursday afternoon in the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee. That panel is sometimes used as a “kill committee” for bills disliked by House leadership.

The bill caused a splash late last year when word leaked out of Roberts’ and Curry’s efforts. Curry left the Democratic Party about the same time and now serves as the Legislature’s only unaffiliated member.

Did in fact die today in “kill committee.” So to recap, what we had here was a very nasty and combative bill, written by and for the insurance industry, that for reasons unknown was being pushed by one of the GOP’s most important state senate pickup hopefuls. We think that in retrospect was a big mistake, if some of the heartless quotes about this bill (bold above, see this post for an industry lobbyist’s even more heinous commentary) don’t find their way into campaign literature against aspiring Sen. Ellen Roberts, the Democrats aren’t doing their job.

As for Rep. Kathleen Curry (I), we still don’t understand what possessed her to sign on to this godawful mercenary bill, and very little of her subsequent behavior has made sense to anyone–but if it was to give some kind of bipartisan cover to the “Sick People Should Wait Act,” well, fail.