Health Data Bill Among Vetoes That Will Stand [Hartford Courant]

By MATTHEW Q. CLARIDA | The Hartford Courant

HARTFORD – The legislature decided Monday not to override any of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s vetoes, including a bill that would have required insurers to share more information on the claims that they reject, especially those related to mental health and substance abuse.

Late attempts to modify a major provision of the bill – which would have called on Access Health Connecticut, the state’s new insurance exchange, to deliver reports on the new data – failed as lawmakers tried to beat the clock in the final days of the session.

Malloy vetoed the bill because of concerns over potential inaccuracies in the data to be collected and conflicts in the role of the insurance exchange.

The bill passed both chambers with no opposition. On Monday, the legislature’s Democratic leadership did not bring the bill –or any of Malloy’s eight vetoes– up for a potential override. Sen. Joe Markley, a Southington Republican and the bill’s primary backer, called the failure to consider an override a “dereliction of duty.”

While the bill made early progress with legislators after being introduced by the programs and investigations committee, Access Health began to complain when an amendment changed the prospective law, drafting the Exchange into service to work with the data at the center of the act.

Access Health’s concerns were especially frustrating to some of the bill’s biggest supporters, who said they had gone out of their way to engage potential opponents of the bill during the drafting process. Rep. Mary Mushinsky, a Wallingford Democrat and a main backer of the bill, said that she had brokered compromises with the insurance industry–including pushing the bill’s final effective date to January 2016–to earn a stamp of approval.

But one of those compromises caused further issues.

“This information [required by the bill] is not information we would be gathering, so it would be hard for us to report on information we didn’t have,” said Access Health spokesperson Kathleen Tallarita this week.

Leading the charge to make the last minute change were Mushinsky in the house and Enfield Republican John Kissel in the Senate. Working against the clock in the first week of May — the session ended on May 7 at midnight — Kissel attempted to find a home for an amendment cutting Access out of the bill.

The most obvious choice was the version of the House bill under consideration in the Senate at the time. But amending the bill in the Senate would have sent it back to the House for final approval, running the risk that time would run out in the session and the bill would not pass.

“Nobody thought any bill would just quickly get amended and just go back down to the house [and pass],” Kissel said last week.

The next option for the amendment also presented issues. Kissel approached the Milford Democrat Gayle Slossberg, who was shepherding a bill which established an informational service for behavioral health care. But Slossberg worried, according to Kissel, that attaching the amendment to her legislation so late in the session would put the whole package in jeopardy.

“You can’t just tack on amendments at the last second to other committee’s bills,” Kissel said last week.
And so Kissel went with a third option: passing the bill as is, taking his chances that Malloy would sign it into the law.

“My thought was, if I think that I can get a bill passed, as opposed to amending it- – and then it may not even get voted on in the House — why wouldn’t I get it passed? Because the governor’s vetoes are few and far between,” he said.

Mushinsky said that, in the end, Access Health simply waited too long to complain.

“If Access Health Connecticut had contacted us earlier, then we would have fixed it earlier. But by the time they did, that horse had already left the barn,” she said.

Malloy vetoed the bill on May 29, citing the awkward role of Access Health as well as concerns about the fidelity of the data to be collected.

Tallarita, the Access Health spokesperson, said that the Exchange did not ask Malloy to kill the bill.
“We did not want the amendment to be included in the bill, but we didn’t ask for the bill to be vetoed,” she said on Monday.

Moving forward, lawmakers said they were encouraged by the governor’s optimistic tone.

“I believe there will be an opportunity…to work together to pursue this bill’s laudable objective in the next legislative session,” Malloy wrote.

“I now have a roadmap from the governor himself as to how to get this legislation cleaned up in a form where not only would he sign it but where he would support it,” Kissel said.

While veto overrides are rare, they are not unprecedented. The Democratic-controlled state legislature overrode 16 of Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s vetoes in six years, making her one of the most overridden governors of the past 70 years. That placed her right behind Gov. Lowell P. Weicker, an independent who lacked an automatic base of party support and endured 17 veto overrides in four years in office.

Rell’s total passed Republican Thomas Meskill, who had 11 vetoes overridden; Ella Grasso, with 10, and Democrats John Dempsey and Abraham Ribicoff, with nine each, according to the Connecticut State Library.
But the legislature has never overridden a Malloy veto, a trend Markley called troubling. He said that the descent of the veto session to mere formality status altered the legislative calendar in an unattractive way. With no real chance at overriding Malloy’s vetoes, the legislature’s work essentially ends with the early-May expiration of the session.

“Having a veto session is a good idea is a good idea. What we should do is respect the process that was established as much as possible and it would take care of itself,” he said. “We do the work hastily under the gun and we reject our opportunities to have a conversation when time allows.”