By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service
TOPEKA — The Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee today passed a bill to require Affordable Care Act health insurance navigators to undergo background checks, be fingerprinted, and pay an annual $100 registration fee.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, a Shawnee Republican and an outspoken critic of the law commonly known as Obamacare, said Senate Bill 362 was designed to protect consumers from identity thieves posing as navigators.
Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat and the committee’s ranking minority member, disagreed. She characterized the bill as little more than a thinly veiled attempt to undercut the Affordable Care Act’s implementation in Kansas.
“Missouri passed something very similar to this and it was found basically to be illegal because it pre-empted federal regulation of the Affordable Care Act,” Kelly said.
“If we wanted to have this sort of control, we probably should have set up our own (health insurance) marketplace,” she said. “The fact that we gave that authority to the federal government means that we have to live under the federal government’s rules and regulations. We can’t pass our own because we don’t like theirs.”
Kelly said she found it odd that the committee’s Republicans were getting “all twisted up” about the potential risk of navigators having access to would-be applicants’ personal information – Social Security numbers, for example – when similar concerns were not raised over those who helped Kansans enroll in Medicare Part D and KanCare.
‘Fraud safeguards’
But Pilcher-Cook said the bill was needed to protect consumers.
“It is incumbent upon us as legislators to put safeguards in place so that there is no fraud and abuse that could happen.”
The new restrictions and screenings, she said, were meant to be safeguards.
“You would call these safeguards, and I would call them barriers,” Kelly said.
The seven Republicans on the nine-member committee voted for the measure. The two Democrats voted against it.
SB 362 requires navigators and their assistants to be certified by the Attorney General’s Office, pay a one-time $250 registration fee, followed by annual renewal fees of $100.
The bill also would forbid navigators from offering “advice about which health insurance plan is better or worse for a particular individual or employer.”
Pay for investigations
The bill would permit anyone to file a complaint against a navigator. The complaint would be investigated by the Attorney General’s Office or referred to a district attorney, but the navigator would be required to pay the costs of the investigation
The committee agreed to support amendments introduced by Sen. Jim Denning, an Overland Park Republican. One would spare currently registered navigators from paying any additional fees until after Jan. 1, 2016, the other dropped a requirement that would have required navigators to maintain a $10,000 surety bond.
“I don’t know that such a surety bond is even available,” Denning said.
Leslea Rockers, a navigator stationed at the Ottawa-based East Central Kansas Area Agency on Aging, attended the hearing.
The bill’s supporters, she said, were ill informed.
“They don’t know what we do. They don’t know how we operate. They’ve never walked anyone through the process,” she said. “We don’t take down any personal information. We don’t print anything off. We don’t do any data entry.
“The client does their own data entry, which, I have to say, can be quite frustrating for someone who’s never been on a computer before,” Rockers said. “We’re not allowed to even have anybody’s phone number. If someone needs follow-up, they have to call us. We can’t call them.”
Court challenge likely
If SB 362 becomes law, Kelly said, its provisions likely would be challenged in federal court.
The Missouri ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by St. Louis Effort for Aids, and Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri.
Linda Sheppard of the Kansas Insurance Department told the committee that the proposed restrictions appeared to be unnecessary.
Cathy Harding, executive director of the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved, one of three organizations in the state charged with training and overseeing navigator efforts in Kansas, said she hadn’t considered filing a lawsuit.
“We’ve had no discussion about that, it’s too early at this point in the process,” she said. “But what we heard today was disheartening. It’s disheartening for us to have policymaker working so hard to put up barriers to people helping their friends and neighbors and community members enroll in private insurance plans in the private market, and that they can afford.”
The bill now goes to the full Senate.