Illinois Legislative Update: Chiropractic Bills Stall

Ben Schwarm provides an update from the Illinois State Capitol, where several key bills are under review. However, critical chiropractic measures failed to meet the deadline and remain stalled for now.

Transcript:

Hi, this is Ben Schwarm, Director of Government Relations for the Illinois Chiropractic Society. I am standing outside of the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield on Tuesday, March 25 as the Illinois House of Representatives are working inside. The Senate is not in session this week, so the legislative session started in January and is scheduled to end by the end of May. But last Friday was the first significant deadline in the legislative process. In order to be considered alive in the session from here on out, a bill would have had to been approved by a committee in either the House or the Senate last week and sent to the respective chamber floors. So, now that that has happened, it has significantly dropped the number of bills that are still in contention to be moving this year. So we have a pretty good idea now of what really is seriously looking at being moved this year.

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So in the House of Representatives, what this meant was that instead of three or 4000 bills being out in limbo waiting to be considered, that has been moved down to about 600 that actually were sent to the House floor; the numbers are similar in the Senate. So as we move forward, we’re going to continue updating you on all of the issues that we are looking at in the legislative process, and we’ll have a legislative report coming out to you soon on that. Two bills that the ICS was really pushing this year and supporting were one that would have prohibited insurance companies from discriminating against healthcare providers and one that would have allowed chiropractic physicians to perform student-athlete health examinations. Unfortunately, neither of those bills were able to move to the House floor by the end of the deadline on Friday, so at least at this moment, they are considered dead. But again, we will continue updating you on all these issues as we go forward, until next time we’ll see you.