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COMMUNITY COLLEGE DAY

Pictured below are more photos from the Community College Day:

FAST FACTS:

• Des Moines Area Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship is helping to grow Iowa’s workforce. For graduates of this program, their wages and employment in 2021 ranged from $43,790 to $50,593. Eighty-six percent of these graduates were employed in Iowa and they earned $12,512 each year more than those not in the program.

   

• Eastern Iowa Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship award 628 students in 2022 with a total of $731,279 and 564 students with $484,193 in 2023.

   

• Iowa Western Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship awarded 294 students with a total of $879,735 in the 2022/23 academic year and 221 students with $478,191 in the the 2023/24 academic year.

   

• Northeast Iowa Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship has helped 1,619 students save $6.1 million on tuition since 2019.

   

• Southeastern Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship awarded 306 students with a total of $894,000 of direct support during the 2022/23 academic year.

BILL ON ELECTRIC ADVANCE RATEMAKING

• HF 2554: This is a bill that relates to electric power regulation, energy storage, and transmission facilities advance ratemaking principles. Advance ratemaking is a practice where utilities petition the Iowa Utilities Board for a pre-established set of regulations and rate of return for future energy projects, allowing them to recover costs proactively to reduce risk.

   

• This is a good bill that helps to establish base load, which is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, so that the rate costs are kept down.

   

• Overall, this piece of legislation essentially adds oversight to the electric process by making the Iowa Utilities Board privy to the growth of any electrical company in any certain sector. Infrastructure such as wind turbines and solar panels are subsidized by the government, so electrical companies tend to build a great number of them as it is fairly cheap to do so. However, this creates an excess of energy in our state, so it’s passed on to the MISO Grid. The MISO Grid is the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and manages the flow of electricity across the high-voltage, long-distance power lines that stretch from Canada all the way down to Texas. This energy is then sold to other states to use, like Illinois for example. The ratepayers, i.e. people like you and me, pay for this energy, so we want to make sure we are getting the best return on this investment by adding more supervision.

   

• In addition to all of that, it also opens the door for future conversations on moving towards nuclear energy here in Iowa, which has the potential to be the cleanest energy source yet.

Please join me at www.wilzforiowa.com and on Facebook at Hans for Iowa House District 25 to stay up to date on everything I’m doing!

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BILLS IN THE WORKS

• PBMs…what are these? PBM stands for “pharmacy benefit managers” and they are a third party administrator of prescription drug programs for commercial healthcare plans, self-insured employer plans, Medicare Part D plans, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, as well as state government employee health plans.

• This week, the House Commerce Committee unanimously passed House Study Bill 640 related to Pharmacy Benefit Managers.

   

• This bill prohibits discrimination by PBMs against pharmacies, requires profits from spread-pricing to go back to the employer/insurer, and requires an appeals process for pharmacies that are unable to acquire drugs at the reimbursement rate from the PBM.

   

• In 2022, the legislature brought PBM oversight under the Department of Insurance, and this session, the department also brought a bill based on a year and a half of regulating the industry. House File 2099 expands PBM’s duty of good faith and fair dealing to pharmacies and prohibits retaliation against pharmacies that file complaints against PBMs. These bills are now eligible to be considered on the House Floor.

   

• This is a very important issue for our community as this legislation will help our friends out over at Southside Drug.

This week, the House Health and Human Services Committee advanced House Study Bill 502, the very first bill that I chaired for this Legislative Session, unanimously. This bill provides for an enhanced rate for psychiatric medical institutions for children that care for children with specialized needs. The children’s mental health facilities often must turn away difficult children that require additional support because of cost. This bill will ensure that those kids with specialized needs like a history of aggression, diagnosis of intellectual or developmental disability, or those with sexualized behaviors are cared for and receive treatment. This bill also makes many regulatory changes that PMICS have noted as barriers to providing care.

The legislature has prioritized expanding access to mental health care in Iowa over the last 6years and will continue to work on this important issue. Just last year alone, the legislature had the following bills signed into law on this topic:

• Mental Health Rate Increase – The HHS budget (SF561) provides $13 million in increased state funding towards mental health and substance abuse Medicaid rates. In total with federal funding, this is over $35 million increase to ensure that the state can recruit and retain mental health providers to care for Iowans in need. These increases came based on a Medicaid rate review that compared Iowa’s mental health rates to surrounding states and to Medicare.

   

• Medical Malpractice – House File 161 limits the total amount of noneconomic damages for a medical malpractice claim at $2 million for causes of action involving a hospital, and at $1 million for all other causes of action.

   

• Rural Emergency Hospitals – Senate File 75 establishes licensure in Iowa for Rural Emergency Hospitals. Federal law created this designation in 2020, and has allowed this new hospital designation to begin January 1, 2023. This bill also requires ambulatory surgical centers to be licensed in Iowa.

   

• Mental Health Non-Competes – House File 93 prohibits noncompete agreements with mental health providers, allowing the provider to stay with their patient.

   

• Psychologist Prescribing – House File 183 removes the requirement that a psychologist complete certain requirements within 5 years of being issued a conditional prescription certificate. This bill also changes that the physician supervising does not need to be board-certified in specific specialties.

   

• Psychiatrist Public Fellowship – House File 274 revises the state-funded psychiatry residency program that was established last session, to include two fellowship positions. The program will annually graduate 9 psychiatry residents and 2psychiatry fellows.

   

• Physician Assistants – House File 424 repeals requirements that physician assistants practice under the supervision of a physician, and instead requires collaboration, including psychiatric PAs.

   

• Commitment Hearings – House File 466 allows health care providers who have examined a patient involved in a substance abuse or mental health commitment to testify by video. Current law only allows for telephone testimony.

   

• Mental Health and Disability Services –House File 471 comes from the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services to specialize the Independence Mental Health Institute to behaviorally complex youth and the Cherokee MHI to acute and forensic adults, makes changes to the Regional MHDS Governing Board makeup, and adds competency-based restoration to the core service domains of the MHDS Region.

HOW IS THE CAPITOL SO SHINY?

DID YOU KNOW?

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate is announcing that February 13 will be recognized as Statewide High School Voter Registration Day. On this day, Iowa high school students are encouraged to take steps to register to vote, make a plan to vote when they are eligible, and learn more about Iowa’s voting process.

Please join me at www.wilzforiowa.com and on Facebook at Hans for Iowa House District 25 to stay up to date on everything I’m doing!

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ACHIEVEMENTS:

I had the honor of getting to chair the subcommittee on HSB 555, which is a bill that deals with public utilities, specifically by adding electric storage unit and nuclear to the list of energy production facilities. It also removes an annual report to the legislature on small wind innovating zone applications and also requires electric storage units over 25 megawatt hours of electricity to have a generating certificate. Not only that, but it increases the amount for affiliate transactions that are exempt to $250,000 and increases the statement of franchise for cable and video services from 10 to 25 years. In simpler terms, this piece of legislation would essentially increase reliability, reduce costs, and clean up the code when it comes to energy. This bill ended up passing that subcommittee and was brought before the Commerce Committee and ended up passing that as well. Now it will move forward to the House Floor where it will be voted on to determine if it will become a law or not.

EXCITING NEWS:

An exciting bi-partisan issue that I am helping to champion is cancer prevention. Iowa is the number two state in the nation in terms of cancer cases and that is the wrong podium to be on. Representative Austin Baeth, myself, and others have collaborated to find the best possible solution to tackle this problem. We have a number of bills that are being put forward that are related to one another in terms of cancer prevention. Typically, when an issue like this is put forward, a group of bills will be put together, which would be called an omnibus bill, where all the bills are wrapped into one that would cover the whole issue. However, we have decided to come at this problem from a different angle. Instead of wrapping all the bills into one, we have divided them out into individual bills that will be sent to different subcommittees to stand on their own merit. I have the opportunity to then go to each of these subcommittees and speak on behalf of these bills.

One of the bills that we are pushing for is a tax on cigarettes. If you’re anything like me, the last thing you want is more taxes, but what this bill will do is help generate a new source of revenue that will help fund the research on cancer. Another bill that we are putting together is a bill that would help to implement a plan to reduce obesity in our state. Cancer has been shown to be linked to obesity, so tackling this issue will not only help to prevent cancer, but also just generally keep us healthy as well.

Please join me at www.wilzforiowa.com and on Facebook at Hans for Iowa House District 25 to stay up to date on everything I’m doing!