“This really changes the paradigm of health care for women in Colorado,” said Foster. “If you are not part of a group plan, with this bill you will be now able to buy individual insurance that will cover maternity care. Pregnancy will not be considered a preexisting condition any longer. This is a huge step for women, their families, and Colorado.”

The legislation had faced fairly stiff opposition from Republicans, who were concerned women would neglect getting coverage until they were pregnant, that costs would rise for men and that religious organizations opposed to contraception might be forced to support the new insurance plans.

Demcorats argued that women have long been paying for diseases like prostate cancer that don’t really afflict women. They also pointed out that contraception and pre-natal care that helps ensure healthy babies and mothers ultimately saves money for all and that men certainly shared in pregnancies.

“I didn’t want to bring this up,” Foster had said on the Senate floor, “but women have been paying for prostate cancer for years.”

The law will go into effect 1 January 2011.

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Payday lending reform, sponsored by Denver Democrat Mark Ferrandino, will extend repayment periods from two weeks to six months and lower interest rates to 20 percent on the first $300 and 7.5 percent for each $100 after that up to $500. Legislators said that the bill would provide time for borrowers to pay back loans without resorting to additional borrowing.

The campaign finance transparency bill was sponsored by House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Lousiville, and Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, and crafted in response that the United States Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited funds promoting candidates. The new law will bar foreign organizations from funding state races and requires organizations and individuals who give more than a $1,000 dollars to register with the secretary of state. Campaigns must disclose donor information.

Another bill will require campaign issue committees to disclose the same donor information as candidate committees. Colorado Ethics Watch recently highlighted the topic in pointing out possible problems of mis-categorization, arguing that issue committee Clear the Bench Colorado, which is asking Coloradans to vote supreme court justices off the bench, is about candidates not any one issue, and that it should be confined to candidate finance restrictions. Ethics Watch says the practice of non-disclosure of large donations to judicial campaigns could allow criminals to purchase safe judicial havens. The new bill would require disclosure.

Finally, Colorado will thin the tough 1993 law that gave power solely to district attorneys to choose which juveniles to try as adults. The new bill requires DAs to report more thoroughly on the factors that go into those decision. The bill moves the cases of the vast majority of accused 14 and 15 year-olds to the benches of judges, where prosecutors and defenders will be allowed to present evidence and where judges can consider mitigating factors. DAs would still be able to direct file the most extreme crimes. In the case of direct-filed 16 and 17 year olds, the prosecution will be asked to record their reasons for the decision and note a series of factors considered before making the decision. The bill was a compromise between the legislature, which asked for the removal of DA discretion on direct filing, and the governor and district attorneys council, which would have preferred to leave direct file whole.

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The bill, HB 1021, sponsored in the Senate by Denver Democrat Joyce Foster , faced significant push-back on its final reading from Republicans, who remained concerned the bill would force organizations and individuals into paying for contraceptive care they might find morally objectionable. The bill passed on a party line vote.

“I realize that there is a chasm here of philosophy. I do not want to get into that,” Sen. Mark Scheffel, R-Parker, said, as he offered an amendment to limit the mandate for contraceptive care. He aimed to soften the bill to require contraception coverage in not all but just a majority of policies. Republicans on the Senate floor rallied behind the amendment.

“So while we are thinking about young servers at night clubs or ski bums that obviously need maternity coverage or contraceptive coverage,” said Broomfield Republican Shawn Mitchell sarcastically, “in fact, the kind of employers we are really talking about are maybe Catholic charities or a different religious institutions. Why would it be so important to this body to ram this unbending program on such employers? It is a self-selected group that works for those kinds of employers.”

“Please respect diversity. Please respect freedom of choice. Please respect freedom of conscience,” he said.

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R- Berthoud, pleaded for contraceptives to be removed from some policies.

“Please accommodate the minority opinion. Don’t put in place the tyranny of the majority. You have the votes for the bill… acknowledge that not everybody agrees. There are concerns as to what are contraceptives.”

Bill sponsor Foster simply noted again today as she has in earlier debates that women for years have been paying into plans that offer prostate coverage, which offers them no benefit, that spreading costs is how insurance is supposed to work.

As it is now in Colorado, women without access to group health insurance plans, who struggle to pay for either contraception or maternity care out of pocket, are pushed by economics toward abortion, which is covered.

Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, said the point of the is to provide greater choice for individuals, not for institutions.

“There is no individual who is forced to use contraception.”

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Sen. Kevin Lundberg

Senate sponsor Joyce Foster, D-Denver, defended HB 1021, saying the bill was long overdue.

“[Women] today can receive coverage if they are in group plans because there was a federal law in 1978 mandating that all group policies cover maternity care and contraceptive care, which came a little later… So now in 2010 I am here to say: It is time to do the right thing for our moms and babies and require that a majority of the plans on the individual market provide maternity care and that all of the plans provide contraceptive coverage.”

Foster said that there are roughly 130,000 women in the individual health insurance markets who can not buy maternity coverage because insurance companies consider pregnancy or even fertility a preexisting condition. Pointing to inadequacies that spin out of a bias toward men, she said that women can’t get coverage for maternity or basic reproductive care, but they “can receive prostate screening and care, because it is mandated.” Foster said all the bill attempts to do is make sure women looking to buy individual insurance plans– an expanding consumer category– have the same kind of basic options that women have who pay for group coverage, like those provided by employers.

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, thought the thinking behind the bill was bad economics and would spur people to drop their insurance altogether.

“Do the math on what this is going to do to allow people to afford health insurance or not,” he said. “The cold hard reality is that every time you require something additional to medical insurance, you drive people out of the medical insurance market.”

Foster acknowledged that rates on the individual market might rise slightly, between 1 percent and 7 percent.

As the Colorado Independent has previously reported, women on the individual market in Colorado now can’t find any policies that might cover eventual pregnancy or prenatal care or childbirth services. Insurance agents told the Independent to pay out of pocket or extend expensive COBRA plans. They flatly recommended against alternative unreliable hodge-podge insurance products.

“Maternity benefits on the open market are crummy in Colorado,” one agent told the Independent. “It’s pitiful that it is that way.”

Most of the individual-market plans, however, do cover abortions.

The reality on the ground in Colorado, and one unacknowledged by the Republican lawmakers today, is that women without access to group health insurance plans, who struggle to pay for either contraception or maternity care, are pushed by economics toward abortion.

Yet Lundberg took issue with the fact that some contraception mandated by the bill works to dislodge fertilized eggs, a form of abortion. He seemed to be arguing that women buying health plans required to include contraception would also be indirectly supporting contraceptive abortifacients like IUDs and the “morning after” pill.

Looking to answer Lundberg’s line of argument before it got rolling, Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, said that according to Colorado Law abortifacients are not used to prevent a pregnancy and so are not considered contraceptives.

Lundberg wasn’t so sure. He said the definition of pregnancy in Colorado was unclear.

“Pregnancy means that point which the unborn child is implanted in the uterine wall– and that is several days after the biological beginning of that person,” he said. “The problem we have– and I am just explaining it… This bill says the insurance plans will be required to include contraceptives, which does include some devices and drugs that are abortifacient, if you consider the unborn child to have biologically begun three to five days before implantation in the uterine wall.

“That may seem like a little detail. But it is a moral repugnance to many people that Colorado law would require this to be mandated and that Colorado even defines pregnancy this way.”

Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, disagreed with Lundberg’s interpretations. She viewed the bill as dealing with contraception not abortifacients. She did agree however that the bill was an unfair mandate on insurance companies.

“This is absolutely a contraception bill, not an abortion bill, but one that I can not support.”

Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, argued that he would support a bill that would require insurers to offer at least one plan with maternity coverage but not a bill that mandates a majority of plans to include maternity as Foster’s bill now does.

Foster said she amended the bill because insurance companies required to provide only one plan with maternity coverage simply make that one plan very expensive so no one buys i so they don’t have to cover the services. That kind of bill would simply maintain the status quo, she said.

Harvey didn’t see it that way.

“Why should the Harvey household have to pay for your mandate? If you want to pay for that care for other people, you pay for it. I don’t need to pay for it.”

He said the increases in insurance costs could force more Coloradans off the insurance rolls.

Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver , said that the bill was morally right, that women should enjoy the same kind of basic coverage men enjoy. He said that it was about a honoring the social contract. We are simply better off as a society when women have access to contraception and maternity coverage, he said.

“What we are saying is that in a social contract it is appropriate for us to speak for all people within the class equally and not to discriminate against them because they have different health conditions. ”

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Lobby Day: Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains supporters and staff (Boven)

“We are here to talk to our state legislators about House Bill 1021 as part of our efforts for Lobby Day,” Monica McCafferty, media relations specialist for Planned Parenthood of the Rockies told the Independent. “We believe that reproductive healthcare is basic health and it should be treated like that in the individual market. We are asking the legislature to restore the maternity coverage mandate and to make sure that contraception is covered.”

House Bill 1021 has already been thinned in committee and as it stands would essentially leave women in Colorado who aren’t enrolled in a group plan with access only to high-cost special maternity coverage policies or no coverage at all.

The bill was amended last week in the Senate Committee on Business, Labor and Technology and passed on a party line vote. It now only requires insurance companies to offer at least one individual-market policy that carries maternity coverage but it would also require that all individual-market policies cover contraception. Analysts say insurance companies, looking to avoid maternity claims, would respond to the mandate by only offering a single expensive policy that almost no women would buy.

House sponsor Beth McCann, D-Denver, told the Colorado Independent weeks ago that she expected her bill would have trouble making its way through the Senate, where conservatives would argue it placed an unfair burden on insurance companies. A strong version of the bill passed the House with little opposition.

The bill passed through the Senate committee on a party-line vote, suggesting a Senate Democrat might have amended the bill because, even as amended, it received no GOP support.

Senate sponsor Joyce Foster, D-Denver, told the Colorado Independent that the bill was only voted on in its present state because she “wanted the bill out of committee.” She said she would be offering a new amendment on the floor Thursday.

“There will be a motion tomorrow to amend, so that in the individual market each insurance company will have to have the majority of their plans offering maternity care. So, if they have five plans, three of them have to have maternity coverage. That worked better because it spreads the risk and that will be better than having [maternity coverage all lumped] into one [policy]. Even prostate [coverage] is in all policies!”

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K. Jerry Frangas, D-Denver, the representative co-sponsoring the bill called the birth control portion of the bill a “no-brainer.”

“My understanding is that some insurance companies cover Viagra. If we’re going to cover reproductive issues or issues related to one gender, we should cover reproductive issues related to both genders,” he said. “It’s an issue of discrimination.”

State Rep. K Jerry Frangas, D-Denver

The market solution

According to the Colorado Division of Insurance, Colorado has no law that mandates insurance companies to cover birth control.

“We do not have a law in Co that addresses [birth control], said Cameron Lewis, spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Insurance. “There have been some actions taken in other states where if you offer something for one sex you have to offer a comparable thing for another. So fo example you couldn’t offer Viagra for a man unless you offered birth control for a woman…But in Co we do not have a law or mandate that addresses that.”

For example, according to a representative at ehealthinsurance.com, in every other state in the Union where United Health Care offers insurance, their plans would cover an Intra-Uterine Device (IUD) insertion, he said. But not in Colorado. Here, he explained, a woman would have to pay for the IUD out-of-pocket, with no amount of that payment going toward her deductible.

Colorado insurance companies are also not required to offer plans that cover standard maternity costs on the individual market. Employer-sponsored health care plans in Colorado, and all states, provide maternity, per the terms of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

According to insurance agents in the state, companies simply don’t offer maternity coverage because they’re not required to. Women can purchase maternity riders on some plans, but that process is riddled with hitches. (See here for The Colorado Independent’s investigation of the maternity rider market.)

Mounting lawmaker support

Frangas said he initiated the maternity bill after years of complaints from constituents who were entrepreneurs, or otherwise without employer-sponsored coverage.

“There are a lot of people in northwest Denver that are on individual insurance plans, so through the years, I’ve gotten a number of people complaining about this particular issue,” he said. “And it didn’t seem like it was going to resolve itself, and the insurance companies weren’t going to do anything, so I decided I was going to carry it.”

Frangas’s bill has passed through the Interim Health Care Committee and the Legislative Council. He expects it to be heard in the House sometime in January.

District 8 Representative Beth McCann, D-Denver is co-sponsoring the bill, as are Senators Joyce Foster, D-Denver and Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood.

Frangas acknowledged that the bill will likely draw fire from the insurance industry. He expects the industry lobby to argue that covering birth control and maternity will drive up premium costs.

We always pay

“The one thing I think they’re not really seeing or acknowledging is that no matter what, if somebody doesn’t have maternity care, we ultimately pay for it,” said Frangas.

Frangas pointed out that a baby who doesn’t have good prenatal care can wind up in a neonatal intensive care unit and cost an insurance company up to $500,000. Equally, mothers who don’t have maternity insurance, and can’t pay their medical bills, contribute to hospitals’ un-reimbursed costs. Those costs are passed on to health insurance companies, and ultimately to health insurance consumers.

“Then you look at the birth control issue. You can go on endlessly [about costs] there,” he said.

“We always pay for it,” he said. “So any argument that this will raise your rates is invalid.”

Chaer Robert, a board member at the Women’s Lobby of Colorado, said she’s hoping there will be a fiscal note in the bill suggesting that it will cut state Medicaid costs.

According to Robert, over one-third of the babies born in Colorado are born on state-sponsored health insurance. In part, she said, that’s because the state is less stingy about assistance if a woman is pregnant. But she also wondered if women are going on state assistance because they have no other options.

“A certain percent of folks maybe would have maternity coverage if they could really get it at any realistic level,” she said.

This post has been updated to more accurately describe Colorado’s current laws about covering birth control.

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The state lawmakers voting yesterday were the ten members appointed to an interim legislative Health Care Task Force. The committee is made up of six Democrats and four Republicans. The vote broke party lines.

Yea voters included Senator Joyce Foster, D-Denver, and Representatives Jerry Frangas, D-Denver, Beth McCann, D- Denver, and Dennis Apuan, D- Colorado Springs.

Nay voters included Senators Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass, Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood; and Representatives Jim Kerr, R-Littleton, and Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs.

The resolution (pdf) enumerates ills of the present health care system. The sytem fails to cover people conception to death; it is costly and bureaucratic and wasteful; there is care rationing; it is tied to employment and not competitive.

Then the resolution lists reasons why a single-payer system is worthy of support. Single-payer has been analyzed as the most comprehensive solution; it would cover all areas of services; it would focus on preventative care; it might in fact streamline bureaucracy.

The resolution signatories would consent to all of the above and so on and then send the resolution to members of the Colorado Delegation in D.C. and to President Obama, urging them to pass single-payer health reform.

The resolution was voted down. But as was made clear at Saturday’s major health care town hall in Aurora– where six members of the delegation appeared– fact is, even if the delegation doesn’t support a full-on single-payer system, it supports a public insurance option as part of any reform bill. Indeed, Rep Jared Polis called single-payer care a “false stalking horse” used to scare off reform. The important thing, he said, was to provide real competition to the private insurers through a public not for profit system where prices are held down.

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(Photo/Danny Hammontree, Flickr)

Late Monday morning, the Senate passed SB 88 on a voice vote, The Associated Press reports. Some opponents said the bill ran contrary to the will of voters, who voted down a ballot measure in 2006 that would have established domestic partnerships in Colorado, while others echoed a Focus on the Family ad that claims the bill — estimated to cost the state $116,000 the first year — is too expensive in a fiscal crisis.

Republican Sen. Scott Renfroe of Greeley raised more fundamental objections to the bill. According to the AP, “Renfroe said the bill goes against his religious beliefs and that homosexuality is an offense to God. He quoted Bible passages about the creation of Eve as Adam’s helper and about homosexuality.”

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Sen. Jennifer Veiga of Denver, who is the Legislature’s only open lesbian, replied that God made her too. She also told lawmakers the measure won’t put gay and lesbian couples one step closer to walking down the aisle, the Rocky Mountain News reports.

The bill, which passed without amendment through two Senate committees, faces a final vote in the Senate this week and then goes to the House, where the Legislature’s lone openly gay member, Democratic Rep. Mark Ferrandino of Denver, is the other sponsor.

Sen. Joyce Foster, a Denver Democrat, scoffed at the notion SB 88 is “cutting edge” legislation, the Rocky reports. She said she voted to add similar coverage for city employees a decade ago when she was a member of the Denver City Council.

What’s old hat in Denver, however, can still generate plenty of controversy in neighboring Aurora. After several postponements, that city’s council is scheduled to decide Monday night a similar measure adding same-sex domestic partners to the city’s personnel manual, which would grant the same health insurance and other benefits, including the right to take family medical leave, as are currently enjoyed by members of employees’ immediate families.

So far, none of the Aurora council members have mentioned Adam and Eve, but many of the objections are similar to those raised by state lawmakers.

Councilwoman Renie Peterson has said previously that the city, facing a multi-million dollar budget shortfall this year, can’t afford to extend health insurance benefits to domestic partners. The city pegs the cost at $4,500 per employee, or $49,500 based on estimates that 1 percent of employees would seek the coverage.

In a memorandum responding to Peterson after an earlier city council study session, Aurora Human Relations Director Kin Shuman suggested the costs “must be weighted against the potential benefits,” including “placing the city on an equal position with other municipal, county, state and private sector employees in Colorado which currently cover domestic partnerships.” The policy would also help recruit police and firefighters, Shuman wrote.

Another consistent opponent of the proposal, Councilman Bob FitzGerald, said at a city council meeting a month ago that he cannot vote “in any manner” for the change until he gets a go-ahead from Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. FitzGerald said he requested Aurora’s city attorney to inquire whether the definition of same-sex domestic partnership in the proposal is “constitutionally permissible,” based on a state constitutional ban on gay marriage.

He’s unlikely to get clearance from Suthers, the attorney general’s spokesman told the Colorado Independent earlier this month. Nate Strauch wrote in an e-mail:

We never received such a request. Furthermore, cities and counties cannot request opinions of the Attorney General. Only the Governor, Secretary of State, executive departments, and legislative leadership can request opinions.

FitzGerald said at a city council meeting a month ago that he has “substitute language” he would like to propose to keep the city’s personnel policy within state law. Earlier, FitzGerald told the Colorado Independent he was considering proposing a change to allow employees to designate anyone as a “plus one” beneficiary on benefits coverage.

An attorney who serves on the board of Equal Rights Colorado, a gay rights advocacy group, disputed FitzGerald’s contention that the benefits change might run afoul of state law. “If there were any kind of constitutional cloud over this, it would have come up in other places,” Pat Steadman told the Colorado Independent in December. “This isn’t about marriage. No higher ed governing board or city council can change that.”

Steadman pointed to a growing number of Colorado cities and counties adopting coverage for same-sex partners. “I’m aware of no challenge to any existing employee benefits package premised upon that question,” he said, referring to domestic partner benefits in light of Amendment 43, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. “In fact, just the opposite — the frequency where the incidence of that benefit being offered is spreading.”

At least 20 cities and four counties in Colorado offer the benefit to employees, according to data compiled by the Colorado Municipal League at the request of the Colorado Independent.

Cities offering insurance coverage to same-sex partners of employees: Breckenridge, Denver, Golden, Littleton, Brighton, Boulder, Commerce City, Englewood, Glendale, Lafayette, Lakewood, Northglenn, Central City, Frisco, Gunnison, Brush, Wheat Ridge, Windsor, Aspen, and Durango, which added the benefit in the fall. Counties offering the benefit include Logan County, Boulder County, Pitkin County and Summit County. The Regional Transportation District also offers the coverage.

(Photo/iChaz, Flickr)

Political action committees, which typically represent labor or business concerns, have long shoveled money toward candidates. But in the past two years since Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to bribery charges, PACs and other interest groups have fallen out of favor with some politicians who want to maintain a squeaky clean image.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama swore off PAC support, and now two Colorado state legislative candidates, Democrats Lois Court and Joyce Foster, are doing the same, eschewing the support of interest groups in an effort to appear more populist. Paul Rosenthal, a former Democratic contender for the state House, took a similar pledge, but he lost in the primary election last month.

“You try to distinguish yourself as someone who is clean, a reformer, not someone who is bought and paid for by Jack Abramoff,” says Robert Duffy, chair of the political science department at Colorado State University.

“In some cases, not accepting PAC money can be an effective fundraising tool. It might be the case that PACs aren’t going to make contributions to you anyway, and that you are saying, ‘I’m not going to take PAC money.’ It still allows you to go ahead and point yourself as someone above suspicion and help you raise money from individuals. It has helped Obama. He has no shortage of cash.”

Court, who is running in Denver’s House District 6, a Democratic stronghold, says that her denunciation of PAC money was a “significant factor” in her three-way primary win and that it helped — not hampered — her ability to raise money. According to campaign finance reports, Court has reeled in around $68,000 so far, and has agreed to the state’s voluntary spending limit to shell out less than $68,900 on her campaign.

Court’s Republican contender in November’s general election, Joshua Sharf, has raised around $12,000. None of it is from PACs, though he hasn’t made a similar statement denouncing the committees.

Court, who teaches political science and government at Denver Community College and Red Rocks Community College, says she decided to go PAC-free when she saw how disillusioned her students were with the political process.

“To me, the entire process has been diverted from the public believing that they are part of the democratic system to thinking they are the observers of a special interest system,” she says. “I want my constituents, the public, the lobbyists and the interests groups to know that any decision that I make I am making because I think it is the best public policy in my district, not because someone influenced me with money or favors.”

Court, as well as Foster, who is running in Senate District 35, and Rosenthal, who launched a failed bid for House District 9, were all motivated by the Colorado king of the anti-PAC movement, Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon.

“I have been an advocate for reducing the influence of money and for other candidates to do the same thing,” says Gordon, who lost a bid two years ago for secretary of state and who is term-limited this year. Gordon says he’s rejected PAC money since he first ran for public office in 1992. “Candidates are concerned. They say, ‘How am I going to raise my money?’ And I say, ‘It will help you more than it will hurt you.’”

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office does not keep track of candidates who refuse PAC money. But Gordon says the no-PAC tack seems to have reached a high this year in Colorado with the three Democrats refusing special interest money. PACs in Colorado, which are referred to by the SOS as “small donor committees,” may give up to $2,125 to legislative candidates for the primary and general elections.

In spite of the benefits to refusing PAC dollars, taking the high road can be a bumpy ride. Rosenthal says that his stance caused him to lose the primary election, when his opponent, Joe Miklosi, brought in PAC money. Miklosi has raised more than $50,000 so far — more than $13,000 of it from PACs — while Rosenthal raised around $32,000.