Bill could help rural optometrists with one-sided national vision plans

    A bill designed to help rural optometrists who participate in national vision plans control costs won approval last week from the House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee.
    Republican Rep. Jon Becker of Fort Morgan is one of the sponsors of House Bill 1012, one of several efforts he’s mounted to help local health care providers deal with problems they face from national health care providers that dictate the price of services.
    Becker told the House committee that currently an optometrist is required to provide deep discounts on services that the vision plans don’t cover, and that often means they lose money. His bill would prohibit that practice, leaving the optometrists free to charge the appropriate price for services provided.
    Optometrists testified that such a practice results in cost-shifting, which means the loss on one customer is passed onto others, such as the uninsured or those covered by Medicaid or Medicare.
    The national vision care industry, not surprisingly, opposed the bill. They claimed such a law would take away benefits from customers, such as for a second or third eyeglass frame, for example, when a child loses his or her glasses.
    Dr. Zoey Loomis of Fort Collins told the committee that just a few national vision plans monopolize the market in rural communities. Individual doctors have no negotiating power to change terms, but the vision plans can change the terms without the consent of the doctor. “Basically, it’s a ‘take it or leave it’ contract,” she said.
    The national vision plans bring in a lot of patients, she explained, but the plans are one-sided and require her to discount services that the plans don’t even cover.
    She explained to this reporter that, for example, a patient might come in for an eye exam, eyeglasses and contact lenses. The vision plan covers the exam and the eyeglasses but not the contacts nor the fitting for those contacts. And yet the vision plan gets to dictate what she can charge for those latter services, frequently well below what it costs her to provide them.
    “Patients are harmed due to inflated prices in order for the optometrist to stay in business,” she said. She has to hike prices higher than what they could be in order to account for those discounts required by the vision plans.
    Nineteen states have also done what Becker’s bill anticipates, and it passed out of the committee on a 10-3 vote. It now heads to the full House for debate.
    
Rural broadband bill moves on to House
    The Colorado Senate has given final approval to the bill that they hope will finance broadband access in rural communities.
    Senate Bill 18-002 would take dollars from a fund that currently finances phone landlines and transfer it to a broadband deployment fund. Those dollars would then go to private telecom providers in rural areas to either provide broadband service for the first time or improve what’s already there. The dollars targeted in the bill currently go to CenturyLink.
    The bill, which is sponsored by Senate President Pro tem Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling and Sen. Don Coram of Montrose, passed the Senate on Feb. 8 on a 30-5 vote.
    Under the measure as introduced, the fund, known as the High Cost Support Mechanism, 20 percent of the CenturyLink dollars would go to the broadband fund per year for five years, exhausting that portion of the fund.
    Sonnenberg and Coram had sought approval last week from the Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee to ramp that up to 60 percent in the first year and 10 percent for the next four years. That was opposed by CenturyLink as well as four members of the seven-member committee.
    But when SB 2 got to the Senate floor, it was a different story. Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, a Denver Democrat who has long advocated for improvements to rural broadband, offered that same amendment, and it was approved by the full Senate.
    The bill now moves on to the House, where it will be sponsored by Democratic Speaker of the House Crisanta Duran of Denver and House Majority Leader K.C. Becker of Boulder.
    
Becker gets approval for concurrent enrollment bill
    Jon Becker won final approval of a bill to encourage more information to high school students and their parents about concurrent enrollment and the ability for a high school student to take college courses while in high school and have those course credits apply both to high school graduation requirements as well as the beginnings of a college degree from a Colorado college or university.
    Currently, school districts must notify students and parents about the opportunity to enroll in college courses while the student is still in high school. The measure would add information on the benefits of completing college courses.
    Becker’s HB 1005 won a 49-15 vote from the House on Tuesday and heads to the Senate, where it is sponsored by Republican Sen. Kevin Priola of Henderson.

Proposed grants could help cities with sudden job losses
    A Senate committee also gave a first round of approval recently to a bill that could help rural communities that experience sudden job losses or other significant economic events.

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