A trio of bills of primary focus

Last week I reported that the legislature would at some point in the second half of session likely take up Prevailing Wage and Real ID. Another “biggie” that I did not mention was Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). It turned out the House tackled all three of those bills in the first week back from break.

Prevailing Wage is another of the labor reform bills. Opponents say it will lead to lower pay for construction companies.

Proponents say it will provide lower costs for schools and other government building projects, saving taxpayers’ money. Proponents also argue that rural schools and rural construction companies are disadvantaged by current Prevailing Wage laws, and the reform will help both.

It appears both the opponents and the proponents are right. While several flavors of Prevailing Wage reform bills were filed, the House passed a full repeal of Prevailing Wage in HB104 by a vote of 89-60. That bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Real ID (HB151) was a bill that had been discussed a few weeks before break, but had been laid over for later. This week it was brought back up and passed in the House 99-40.

The controversy over voting against the bill meant voting to possibly prevent Missourians access to military bases and airplane flights (if the federal government makes good on its threat), whereas voting for the bill meant exposing Missourians private personal data to federal government overreach and potential data hackers.

So, House members each chose what they thought would be the lesser of two evils, and passage won out over defeat. That bill also now moves to the Senate, where they also have a Real ID bill which seems to have stalled.

The last bill is PDMP, HB 90, which is an attempt to curb the abuse of prescription drugs by establishing a database that doctors, pharmacies, and governments can share to see what medicines have been prescribed to which Missourians by which doctors.

The thought is that if a doctor or pharmacy can see that a patient has recently been prescribed painkilling pills (addictive opioids), they probably don’t need any more for proper use and can deny more pills to prevent the patient from developing or feeding an addiction.

Proponents say that the other 49 states have a PDMP, so we should too, and that a PDMP will be a tool to reduce the opioid abuse epidemic in our country.

Opponents say that Missouri’s opioid abuse is no worse than the other states, so spending $1-$2 million of taxpayer money each year on a PDMP is wasteful, and will only absolve the medical and pharmaceutical industries of their culpability in creating the opioid epidemic, and creates another nosy government database which brings up similar concerns as Real ID.

Again, not an easy vote either way. The PDMP bill passed the House in the first-round vote, and will be on the calendar for a final vote next week.

Also next week, we tackle the $27 billion Missouri budget. I’ll let you know how that goes.