2023 Legislative Session By Maryann Martindale, UAFP CEO/Executive Director The 2023 Legislative Session came in like a lion and went out like a ... lion. If I summed up this session in just a few words, I would call it frustratingly successful. There were some really tough outcomes, but there were also some pretty significant wins. I realize, as I have looked back over previous legislative reports, this seems to be a somewhat consistent theme — great bills, horrible bills, good debates, frustrating debates, legislators I love working with, and legislators I don’t. It really is just a microcosm of our national policy debates with all the tribalism, messiness, hard work, and cautious optimism. Each year, we reorganize our Legislative and Advocacy Committee, inviting statewide members to join our weekly calls and share their insights and expertise, as we review bills and determine our positions. The 2023 session had 929 bills introduced and 575 passed, in addition to countless more bill files opened that were never released. Of the total bills passed, a whopping 363 passed in the final week of the session. With only 45 days in the session, you can imagine how quickly things can move. Adam Brown, an Associate Professor of Political Science at BYU, maintains legislative statistics and found the average time spent on bills was 10 minutes. If you’re a policy nerd like me, you should scan the QR code and definitely check out Brown’s annually updated Guide to the Utah Legislature. https://adambrown.info/p/research/utah_legislature We were in the thick of it from day one as I presented our appropriation request for Medicaid well-care visits. Thanks to our incoming President, Dr. Michael Chen, we learned that despite expanding Medicaid, Utah never approved the codes for an annual well-care visit for adults. As we all know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and providing these important annual visits has the potential to save significant money as well as save lives. Whether it be diabetes, hypertension, hypothyroidism, heart disease, or cancer, early detection will always be critical for effective treatment and hopefully prevention. The codes come with a surprisingly low cost — if every single adult Utahn on Medicaid got an annual well-care visit, the total cost would be less than $250,000. While that may sound like a lot to a personal budget, when you have an annual state budget of $29.4 billion, that’s tantamount to checking the couch cushions for change. Fortunately, with a combination of naivete and hutzpah, we were able to get the request included in the Governor’s budget, meaning the process was a bit less cumbersome and didn’t require a separate bill file, just a champion who we found in Representative Marcia Judkins. It took some frantic penultimate day-of-the-session lobbying to get sufficient funds, but beginning July 1st, you will be able to provide well-care visits to your adult patients on Medicaid. Thanks, Dr. Chen! Another big priority bill was postpartum extension, SB133 which will extend postpartum coverage to most women who qualify for Medicaid to 12 months. Under current Medicaid provisions, a woman giving birth is covered for only 60 days. Data shows that the majority of complications and maternal mortalities occur between 45 and 365 days. Passing this bill was a very heavy lift, but through great collaborative efforts between us, Association for Utah Community Health (AUCH), Utah Public Health Association (UPHA), and the American Heart Association Utah Chapter, the bill succeeded with full funding and will go into effect this summer. We supported a total of 40 bills — some passed, some didn’t — and we prioritized our focus on those bills we believed would make the biggest impact and had the UAFP CEO Maryann Martindale joins Governor Spencer Cox, Lt. Governor Henderson, several legislators, leadership from DHHS, and fellow advocates from AUCH, UPHA, and American Heart Association for a bill signing for SB133 Modifications to Medicaid Coverage which extends postpartum coverage for many women on Medicaid to 12 months. | 22
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