February 13, 2014 The House debated and passed its first legislation of the year this week. We have spent the first four weeks of the session working bills through sub-committees and the standing policy committees. Each of these committees meets at least twice and sometimes three times a week to assign bills to subcommittees and consider bills that have been passed by various sub-committees. Each standing policy committee has from 17 to 21 members and deals only with bills related to a certain area of law or public policy. The standing policy committees that I am serving on this year include Transportation, Judiciary, and Public Safety. Many of the bills that we pass into law are not controversial and may take only a few minutes of actual floor time and debate by the full 100 members of the House. These bills may be as simple as a one or two word correction in an existing part of the Code of Iowa or they could be an addition to a code section on which everyone agrees and has been thoroughly vetted in the committee process. A handful of the bills we passed this week fit into this category. The other side of the coin would be the bills that are controversial and take considerably more time to debate on the floor of the House. We passed two of those this week. Each took about two hours of debate time on the floor. The E-cigarette bill was the first to be passed. The purpose of the bill is to prohibit minors from purchasing or possessing E-cigarettes. These devises use a battery powered heater to vaporize a nicotine solution that can be inhaled similarly to inhaling the smoke from a tobacco cigarette but without the cancer causing components of that smoke. These devises are used to help a person to stop smoking or as a way for a person to satisfy a nicotine addiction without the cancer inducing ingredients of cigarette smoke. Everyone agreed that banning the purchase or possession of E-cigarettes by minors is a good thing; the disagreement came when House Democrats insisted that E-cigarettes be treated the same a tobacco cigarettes under the Smoke Free Air Act. This would ban the use of E-cigarettes in all public places, either indoors or outdoors and could discourage their use as an aid to stop smoking. There is no evidence that nicotine is a carcinogen or that the second hand vapor from an Ecigarette has any harmful effect of any kind. The bill passed as it was originally proposed with over 70 votes and goes to the Senate for their consideration. The second contentious bill, dubbed the Telemedicine Bill, took a little longer. This bill would ban the practice of the dispensing of abortion inducing pills by an offsite physician through the use of a teleconferencing system. The patient would be examined by a nurse or a physician’s assistant and then ushered into a private room with two way video conferencing equipment. The physician would interact by video with the patient; if the doctor determined that the patient met the criteria for a chemically induced abortion, the doctor would electronically dispense the pills without ever having examined the patient in person.
Whether we agree or disagree with our current abortion laws, this seems to be a process that is ripe for manipulation and, in some cases, could be dangerous for the patient. The House minority trotted out all of their standard talking points: “This is part of the war on women,” and “this makes women second class citizens” along with several others. The use of telemedicine will continue to expand but its use for this purpose, where the possible complications could be life threatening, is a step too far. There are reasons why the Iowa Board of Medicine, comprised entirely of MD’s, instituted rules that banned telemedicine abortions. Their reasons were medical, not political. Because those rules are currently tied up in the court system the House acted to ban a practice that the Board of Medicine had questioned whether it was safe or necessary. This bill also now goes to the Senate where its future is questionable.
PLEASE JOIN ME AT THE FORUMS AND COFFEES; I WILL BE HAPPY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND DISCUSS ISSUES WITH YOU.
February 22 10:00 am King’s Pointe Regatta Grill
March 22 10:00 am King’s Pointe Regatta Grill
