There was no shortage of consequential measures power-pushed through the 180-day, now-ended legislative session that warranted a slow, careful look.
Three of those bills, however, should be law now and instead were vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis, we think wrongly.
The first, and most surprising, was Polis’ veto of House Bill 1088 created to prevent so-called “surprise billing” for ambulance services, one of the lingering symptoms of America’s chronic and debilitating health-care ailment.
The problem is easy to understand. Just a few years ago, some U.S. health insurance customers would too-frequently receive “surprise” hospital bills after discharge, and often in addition to hefty co-pays as insurance companies worked to find ways to maximize patient out-of-pocket costs and maximize insurance company profits. The “surprise” would come from fees insurance companies would not cover nor reveal until the services were delivered, sometimes weeks after treatment.
The problem was so egregious and so easy to understand that even a dysfunctional and polarized congress grasped the unfairness and danger of the issue and passed a bi-partisan measure, essentially outlawing the “surprise billing” practice.
Ambulance billing got through a loophole in that law, which, astonishingly, every Republican and Democrat in the Colorado House and Senate agreed to close this year with HB 1088.
In his veto message, Polis said the bill had some technical problems that in his opinion would prevent the measure from being implemented, but his chief complaint was that state officials estimated that forcing ambulance and insurance companies to pay bills without sucker-punching consumers could cost those with insurance between 73 cents to $2 per month in higher premiums next year.
“I am committed to working with proponents and sponsors to protect Coloradans from surprise bills, but I encourage all parties to work towards a more reasonable reimbursement rate that mitigates premium impacts and nets a better deal for Colorado families,” Polis said in his veto message.
The Sentinel, too, would like to have seen a measure that doesn’t cost consumers anything to afford them protection from this unscrupulous billing practice. But hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Colorado residents are at risk of being hit with personal budget-busting “surprise” billing disasters while the state waits at least another year for a fix. Even $2 per person, given that insurance premiums are already hundreds of dollars a month, would have been worth the gamble to remove the fee next year rather than hold out on a solution for a very long time.
Polis’ veto of House Bill 1147 was not a surprise, but nonetheless a deep disappointment from a governor who has prided himself on seeking equality for all Colorado residents.
The bill sought to address a growing problem in cities like Aurora and Pueblo, which have boosted jail sentences for crimes like shoplifting and trespassing far beyond reasonable state justice norms. Aurora city lawmakers have pushed for “get tough on crime” sentences for misdemeanors like shoplifting that have resulted in mandatory jail time for scofflaws who are convicted of walking out on a $15 or larger restaurant bill. An Aurora conviction nets a mandatory three-day jail sentence and allows for even longer.
Critics argue that the disparity in sentencing, sometimes just across the street along city boundaries, has created a 14th Constitutional Amendment problem. The Constitution prohibits harsher sentences for some citizens and not others, dubbed as “equal justice.”
Polis’ biggest criticism of the measure was that it could move in on local control, forcing a state maximum sentencing on local jurisdictions.
Yes. That’s exactly what’s called for here.
In his veto message, the governor also pointed to a pending case in the Colorado Supreme Court trying to answer that question. The Denver Post published an investigative story on the issue last fall, revealing how Pueblo, especially, had created a “get tough” sentencing philosophy that runs afoul of the 14th Amendment, and how a Westminster woman faces a jail sentence 36 times longer than the state maximum for a store theft under $300.
Setting aside the fact that none of these “get tough” cities have provided any substantiated evidence that such sentencing actually prevents crime, decades of research clearly shows that people of color, minorities and the poor are unfairly and unequally served up harsher sentences by these outlier communities than their white and wealthier counterparts.
While it’s likely that the state’s high court will see that and strike down some of these sentences, mirroring the equal protection clause now was called for in the Legislature.
The harshest veto, however, came from upending House Bill 1004. That measure sought to prohibit the use of price-fixing software by rental property owners, especially those with large holdings of rental units in the market.
An extensive 2022 ProPublica investigation into the use of Real Page, an algorithm-driven software for apartment-complex owners, revealed that in markets like metro Denver, large and small industry holders have been able to boost rents even beyond hikes attributed to a growing community.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, told conventiongoers who wandered by his booth in 2022, Pro Publica reported.
The investigation revealed that competing apartment owners used the software allowing managers of thousands of apartment units in a community to check prices almost instantly. The software then suggests a boosted rent, and commercial real estate owners said they system produce profits they’ve not seen before.
Those profits are paid for by struggling renters, a group of people Polis regularly says he supports and works to bring cost-of-living relief to.
In this case, too, Attorney General Phil Weiser has sued Real Page in hopes of persuading courts of his argument, and that of many others, that the scheme is nothing more than price-fixing parading as convenience.
Clearly, if apartment owners run afoul of the law by calling and working hard to scope out area rents in efforts to know how high they can set their own, making an easy app for that is just as illegal.
State lawmakers need to push these measures through again next year, early, so they can override potential vetoes next time and get the jobs done.
If he had vetoed SB217 a few years ago we would still have thousands of experienced police officers working. Instead, he approved it, and now, we have not enough hastily trained young officers. Who do you think is more likely to overreact? Now, the understaffed police departments may not get an officer to you for hours in an emergency. In some cases, they won’t come until the next day or not at all. Meanwhile, the governor and the legislature are telling you how much they care about public safety. Every expert will tell you that any action has to have some evaluation of the effects.