Good background news story from 3/28/02 about the bill that just passed and ETCR's prospects and initial revenue plan:
Prescription-abuse bill is amended
Change would allow state to seek grant for tracking system
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By Al Cross
across@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
FRANKFORT, Ky. -- Two senators who exchanged personal attacks last week worked together yesterday to help the state do a better job of thwarting abuse of prescription drugs.
The Senate Health and Welfare Committee, headed by Republican Sen. Julie Denton of Lyndon, added to House Bill 26 an amendment by Democratic Sen. Daniel Mongiardo of Hazard to authorize the state to apply for a federal grant to test a new, computerized system of tracking prescriptions.
Physicians who volunteer for the program would issue prescriptions on a special form with a bar code that, when scanned at a pharmacy, would put information about the patient and the prescription into a state database.
The state already has a similar database, but the system would expand and improve it, said Jim Millard, executive vice president of Equity Technologies & Resources, a Lexington firm that he said has a provisional patent on the system.
Millard told the committee that his company has a commitment from a reinsurance company that backs medical-malpractice insurance companies to reduce their premiums for doctors who participate in the program. He declined to name the reinsurer.
Eventually, he said, the state could require all doctors to participate in the system. He said the test system would cost the state nothing because he has private investors ready to pay the costs not covered by the grant.
Millard said after the meeting that the state is likely to get the grant because no other states have applied for money from a fund established by Republican U.S. Rep. Harold ''Hal'' Rogers, of Kentucky's 5th District, for the Justice Department.
Once the program is established, Millard said, his company would charge states $1 per person and 25 cents per prescription as a licensing fee.
Sen. Tom Buford, R-Nicholasville, said Kentucky should get more favorable treatment for helping the company establish its product. Millard said that could be negotiated.
The committee's approval of the bill was a 180-degree turn in relations between Denton and Mongiardo, who face re-election challenges this fall and traded sharp, personal barbs in a floor debate Friday.
Mongiardo, a physician, complained that Senate Republican leaders had quashed his bill calling for a study of an electronic network for medical records. Denton, a dental hygienist, defended the move, saying health-care providers had reservations about the concept. Mongiardo said that Denton was ill-informed on the subject and the future of health care, and that ''is possibly a reason why Medicaid is in the shape it is in today.'' Denton said Mongiardo ''likes to tell me how stupid I am. Who died and left him God?''
Yesterday, all that seemed forgotten. After the meeting, Denton said she supported Mongiardo's amendment because it was a good idea, and Mongiardo was contrite.
''I may be slow, but I learn,'' he said. ''I guess I showed my frustration by wanting her to learn everything in a few days I learned in several months.''
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