Montana bill drafting D.C. style

Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Obamacare. Montanans rejected Obamacare’s individual mandate at the ballot box by a 2-to-1 vote. It is not hard to understand why.

Obamacare was crafted behind closed doors by special interest lobbyists — the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry and major health insurers. The public was cut out from the process entirely.

The consequences were disastrous. Thousands of Montanans had their insurance policies canceled last year, and insurance premiums are skyrocketing.

Last week, we learned that legislators, health care lobbyists and the governor’s office have been quietly gathering in secret meetings to devise a Medicaid expansion bill to be enacted by the 2015 Legislature — or even earlier if there is a special session of the Legislature.

This series of nonpublicized meetings, which violates both the Montana Constitution and Montana’s open meeting laws, are being championed by Montana’s “transparent” governor and some legislators who are actively campaigning in primary races on the government transparency bill they sponsored and the governor signed into law in 2013.

Medicaid expansion is a huge issue for the state. The decisions facing us are too big to be decided by a private group behind closed doors. The various options on how to reform the broken, existing Medicaid program to control costs on the largest budget item in the state — which must be done before we consider whether it is prudent to expand Medicaid coverage — are too big to be quickly dealt with in a special session, especially when the proposed bill has not been vetted and discussed publicly.

Gov. Steve Bullock vetoed House Bill 604, which would have created a legislative committee in the interim to publicly discuss and debate health care reform in Montana. Industry groups, members of the public and legislators would have been able to offer ideas, testimony and vet proposals in a transparent fashion. Unfortunately for Montana, the concept of discussing and debating major issues in the public appears to be foreign to Bullock and the handful of legislators toeing the lobbyist line.

During each interim between legislative sessions, there are 15 official legislative administration and legislative interim committees regularly meeting. The elected officials participating in these open meetings are fully aware of a 1995 court decision where the judge ruled “that denying the public access to bill drafts and other documents until the completion of the bill drafting process violates the public’s right to examine public documents under Article II, Section 9, of the Montana Constitution.”

Proposed legislation coming out of legislative interim committees is public information. Anyone can view the current drafts in this open process. However, the precedent set by those legislators involved with drafting the K-12 education bill in secret prior to the last session should trouble everyone, regardless of where you stand on the legislation.

When legislators allow lobbyists to write bills behind closed doors in secret meetings, the public is left out. This is a dangerous loophole being exploited by Gov. Bullock and the so-called “responsible” Republicans, that hearkens back to the days of the “Copper Collar.”

Thus, we can be certain, the Medicaid expansion bill currently being quietly drafted behind closed doors will be touted as a Montana Solution — but in reality, it is a solution perhaps benefiting mainly those entities participating.

This sort of process does not work. The citizens of Montana need to have confidence that legislation brought forward is for the public benefit, not the private benefit of a group of bill sponsors, the governor whose interest is being served, or the lobbyists who wrote the bill.

(Sen. Debby Barrett, R-Dillon, represents Senate District 36, Beaverhead and Madison counties in southwest Montana. She serves as the president pro tempore of the Montana Senate.)