Likely legislation

COEUR d'ALENE - What do potential Medicaid expansion and the rising cost of prison incarceration in Idaho have in common? The answer is they are likely to be topics of debate for legislators in Boise in the upcoming session.

Or they might not. State Rep. Vito Barbieri, a Republican, said Wednesday that when he was first elected, he was warned by former state Rep. Jim Clark that legislative sessions during election years are hard to predict.

"He said they were always very squirrely and you couldn't really tell what was going to come out of a session, because everyone has an eye toward the May primaries," Barbieri told a gathering at the Greenbriar Inn in downtown Coeur d'Alene during the annual legislative send-off luncheon.

The Coeur d'Alene Chamber of Commerce and other area chambers present their legislative priorities at the luncheon. Then North Idaho legislators signal what they see ahead.

"It's going to be a short session, so it should be interesting to see how well it can be controlled by leadership," Barbieri said.

He plans to be occupied working on the "esoteric, but I think pretty important," issue of the amendment process in the House.

"I've discovered that Idaho and Oregon are alone in the way that they keep individual legislators from being able to participate in the amendment process of bills," he said.

State Sen. John Goedde didn't attend the meeting, but he submitted some written comments which were read.

Goedde, a Republican, predicted state education standards, health care exchanges, and Medicaid expansion will be up for debate.

As for the health-care debate, he wrote, "The last piece is the real fix for health care in my opinion."

That effort would direct a change in how doctors and other medical professionals are paid, he wrote, "Focusing on healthy lifestyles and the efficient use of assets available."

Rep. Ed Morse, who attended the luncheon, said Idaho is suffering from the rising cost of prison operations with the constantly growing prisoner population.

"The fastest-expanding area of the state budget is corrections," said Morse, a Hayden Republican. He said it reduces possible spending in other areas like education.

"Forty percent of the people in our prisons were never sentenced to prison," but ended up there anyway because of probation violations, he said. While Idaho has a high incarceration rate, it also has a low crime rate, he said.

"We have a broken and dysfunctional probation and parole system," he said.

Rep. Luke Malek agreed. He said Idaho is failing when it comes to helping people who enter the criminal justice system get their lives back on track.

He said Idaho's one-size-fits-all system is transforming low-risk offenders into high-risk ones who are serving prison sentences to the full term.

"That's extremely cost-ineffective," the Coeur d'Alene Republican said.

He said he also anticipated some debate on Medicaid expansion in this coming session.

"I'd be very surprised if any bill made it to the floor this session in terms of Medicaid expansion," Malek said. "I'm sure there are varying opinions in this room on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing."