MMA Legislative Committee Chairs Jay Mullen, M.D. and Lindsey Tweed, M.D. welcome you to participate in the weekly conference calls of the MMA Legislative Committee.

The last MMA Legislative Committee weekly conference call for the First Regular Session of the 129th Maine Legislature will take place Tuesday, June 11th, at 8:00 p.m.

Legislative Committee members and specialty society legislative liaisons are strongly encouraged to participate. Any physician, practice manager, or other staff member who is interested in the MMA's legislative advocacy also is welcome to participate. It is not necessary to RSVP for the calls. To date the Legislature has printed approximately 1700 bills, and as the deadline for committee consideration is approaching the number of bills printed each week is beginning to dwindle. While that makes the work of the legislative call shorter, it also allows for more in-depth discussion of significant matters.

Please use the following conference call number and passcode. These will remain the same for every weekly call during the session.

Conference call number: 1-603-766-5646

Participant ID - 699139#

The purpose of the weekly conference calls is to discuss the MMA's position on bills printed the previous week, to hear the views of specialty societies on the new bills or their concerns about any current health policy issues, and to discuss the highlights of legislative action of the week. The calls rarely last longer than an hour.

The following are bills of interest to the physician community printed last week. (For those not familiar with the term, a "concept draft" is a bill that contains only a title and a brief description of what it is intended to do. It does not contain the actual bill text.) We will discuss the priority bills marked with an asterisk (*) first.

Following are the bills of the week: 

June 11, 2019

LD 1837,  Resolve, Regarding Legislative Review of Chapter 1: Adult Use Marijuana, a Late-filed Major Substantive Rule of the Department of Administrative and Financial Services, Office of Marijuana Policy. Provides for legislative review of the rules being drafted by the Department of Administrative & Financial Services.

LD 1838,  Resolve, Requiring the Department of Health and Human Services To Examine Options for Upper Payment Limit Adjustments for MaineCare Services. Review of rate limits for MaineCare payments, with instruction to negotiate with federal government. Passed unanimously out of committee.

LD 1839,  Resolve, To Provide Sustainable Funding for Assisted Living Facilities. $570K per year to increase DHHS payments to assisted living facilities under contract, increase number of med passes per day from 3 to 6.