| The Award Winning gathering met in the Award Winning restaurant, and a half dozen Representatives mingled with the bloggers, the constituents, and the Award Winning Mason Tvert.
Representative Morgan Carroll (D-Aurora) has been building bridges in the legislature, and her bi-partisan bowling league showed up in force. Three of her Republican colleagues had finished a night of sweeping the lanes with her, and decided to come along to the event.
Representatives Amy Stephens (R-Colorado Springs), Steve King (R-Grand Junction) and Ellen Roberts (R-Durango) came out and took a look at what the Majority does for fun on a Wednesday night.
Rep. Terrance Carroll (D-Denver), Rep. Mike Cerbo (D-Denver), and Rep. Dianne Primavera (D-Broomfield) also got me up to speed on the legislation they will be carrying this session.
Morgan Carroll has been giving workers some small say in who treats them when they have been injured on the job. The insurance lobby would like to keep the choices as narrow as possible and currently limit patients to the use of a single company picked doctor, Rep. Carroll's HB-1176 gives injured workers in most places the choice between two providers and the one time right to change between the two in the first 90 days of treatment.
That seems like a tiny improvement to me, but sometimes small first steps are the key to building consensus. I was glad to hear that both Rep. Roberts and Rep. King came to the support of the bill, as did four other Republicans. I spoke with Roberts and King about their decision to ignore Party lines on this and they both stated that their votes were actually very much in keeping with Republican values.
Rep. King said that having two doctors increased competition and choice. "When you start to bring in competition, you bring in the market system."
Rep. Roberts agreed that choice was an ideal that Republicans could value, and she added praise towards how earnestly Rep. Carroll had worked to bring all sides to the table and how she had been sensitive to the needs of rural areas by making an exemption for places where choices were structurally limited.
I had a chance to discuss HB-1117 (.pdf) with sponsor Dianne Primavera. It is a law that requires motorcycle riders under the age of 18 to wear a helmet. After seeing 35 years of head trauma victims, and parents riding with un-helmeted children, Rep. Primavera wrote what looks like a fairly common sense bill and shepherded it through the House. It is pretty hard to make a case for personal choice (and I tried) when the subject involves children and the sad reality is that 50% of motorcyclists are uninsured. If this was a 'victimless' crime it would be a different story than the number of other people who can be harmed by a bad parent's neglectful decision.
Still, the case is being made by the fiercely libertarian motorcyclist group ABATE (A Brotherhood Active Towards Education) that this is an infringement on parental rights.
ABC-7
"We feel that it puts the government between a parent and their child," said Terry Howard, ABATE's state coordinator. "We feel that the parents are responsible enough to make sure that their children have helmets on their heads."
ABATE will try to stop it again as Sen. Gordon takes it up in the next chamber. While the Governor has indicated that this bill will likely become law if it gets to his desk, it looks unlikely to Rep. Primavera that universal helmet laws will be following any time soon.
Primavera has a much more pitched battle on her hands as she fights cervical cancer for her second time. The first time it was the real deal when she was diagnosed in the '90s. She beat that, but now is fighting the same forces that have held back medical care since the dark ages as she tries to ensure that other women will have access to proper care.
Her HB-1301 (.pdf) broadens availability of immunizations that have been shown to prevent the disease which kills thousands of women annually. The pro-cancer lobby is led by those that fear that a healthy woman is a promiscuous woman, and that by interfering with the God given curse of HPV our legislature will be encouraging nasty disease free sin. They rally around the Abstinence Only banner, a position that Rep. Primavera likened to being against tetanus shots because you think people should just not step on rusty nails.
Rep. Cerbo gave me the background on two bills under his advocacy. The first involves extending the ability to seal arrest records to include the sealing of conviction records as well. As a muck raking pamphleteer, I am a pretty hard line open records advocate so I have to say I oppose this one and I am glad that HB-1107 (.pdf) has no Senate sponsor yet.
I agree with the Representative that a marijuana conviction at 19 shouldn't haunt someone into their 40s, but I bet Mason Tvert has a more direct idea about how to handle that one. Personally, I think that privacy rights are worth defending, but where there is a legitimate public interest in criminalizing an action I feel that the information surrounding such a conviction (provided it does not infringe on the wrongfully violated privacy of the victim) steps outside of that private veil. I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
Where no convincing is needed, is around Cerbo's Worker's Compensation bill to protect Fire Fighters.
Exposure to benzine causes cancer. The same is true of a dozen other chemicals that Fire Fighters deal with repeatedly. The cancer that these substances cause is already covered by our worker's compensation laws, but the insurance companies make the Fire Fighters take every case to court, hire the doctors, and prove to a jury that their cancer deserves the compensation the law allows.
HB-1008 (.pdf) changes the law to put the presumption of cause for certain types of cancer on the work environment. Under the new rules, Fire Fighters who suffer from cancers that are already known to be work related can get compensation unless an examination shows it to have been pre-existing.
This bill has been highly mischaracterized in the print media, and Colorado Media Matters has done a great job of shooting down the insurance company lies.
Bottom line for me is that if you go to work protecting my house from fire, and if you come away from it with a case of brain cancer, you deserve the compensation without needing to hire a team of lawyers and courtroom doctors.
The evening was a lot more social and schmoozy than I am making it sound, but I want to encourage our Representatives to keep coming in and mingling with the little people by putting a spotlight on some of their good work. I will trust that Lyn and Johne will give the visuals that will show that a big part of DL is just hanging out, sharing ideas, and tossing back some mid-week beverages. Done -johne
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