Legislative Update 2022

2022 Legislative Update (August 2022)

If you have further questions, please email IAMFT via our email address:  info@inamft.org

On the House side, Republicans and Democrats clashed Thursday over the scope of a bill, House Bill (HB) 1001, that includes family financial support and offers inflation relief to Hoosiers. HB 1001 includes approximately $50 million in support for pregnant women and their families. The bill also proposes a $225 check for eligible Hoosiers – but the majority of the amendments considered focused on women’s health, maternal education, contraception, and expanded resources for women surrendering children. These included one that would make products such as diapers, formula and cribs exempt from state gross retail tax. Several amendments did pass, including one concerning an advisory board for doulas and another that would place signage at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles directing questions about pregnancy, adoption and foster care to IN.gov. The bill passed out of the House on Friday afternoon by a vote of 93-2. The bill now heads over to the Senate where significant changes are expected to be made, as the House and Senate have not aligned on how best to address inflation relief. 

 

On the Senate side, their inflation relief package, Senate Bill (SB) 3, includes a six-month stopgap from sales tax on all utility bills for residential customers and a freeze on any new increase in the sales tax on gas; this means the gas sales tax would be capped at the current rate as of July 1 and the freeze would continue through June 30, 2023. Lastly, the bill would provide $400M to pay down the pre-1996 Teachers’ Retirement Fund. The Senate’s inflation relief bill still does not include the governor’s request to provide the $225 taxpayer refund. However, a series of amendments late Thursday did offer alternatives to the governor’s request, including a more limited $125 version of the governor’s favored rebate. The Senate will reconvene Saturday morning at 11am to have a final vote on SB 3. If it passes, it will go over to the House for further consideration and changes. 

 

The highest profile bill of the week was the abortion bill, Senate Bill (SB) 1. Earlier in the week, the Statehouse and surrounding areas were packed with protestors and rallies on both sides of the issue. After passing out of committee earlier this week, the bill allowed for abortions only in the case of the life of the mother, rape or incest. The rape and incest exceptions are limited by the age of the pregnant person. The bill went to the full Senate late yesterday for consideration of 62 amendments. The amendment that gained the most attention was offered by Sen. Mike Young of Indianapolis who recently announced he is leaving the Republican Caucus over the way Senate Republican leadership has handled the abortion bill and other matters. His amendment would have stripped out the language in the bill dealing with exceptions for rape and incest victims, leaving only an exception for the life of the mother. After several hours of emotional and heated debate, the Senate voted 28-18 against the amendment. Eighteen Republicans joined 10 Democrats in voting to keep the rape and incest exceptions in the bill. Other amendments were approved, including a Republican amendment that allows the Indiana attorney general to gain the authority to override a prosecutor’s decision not to pursue abortion-related cases. Two amendments offered by Democrats were also approved by the Senate. That included one which directs a statewide maternal mortality review committee to study how changes to the state’s abortion laws affect maternal mortality in Indiana. Another indicates that a pregnant minor doesn’t have to get her parents’ permission for an abortion if she’s impregnated by her parent, legal guardian or custodian. The bill has gone to the House for hearings as of 8/1/22. 

 

(update September 2022)

Throughout the course of this week, the House made several changes to the abortion bill. Lawmakers pushed the effective date of the bill back to Sept. 15 instead of taking effect immediately upon passage. The House also amended the bill to clarify the language on exceptions and “life of the mother” and to limit the ability to abort a pregnancy due to rape or incest to 10 weeks regardless of the age of the pregnant person. The bill now allows for a medical abortion when “reasonable medical judgement dictates that performing an abortion is necessary to prevent any serious health risk to the pregnant woman or to save the pregnant woman’s life.” The House removed the criminalization of doctors language, Senate language regarding the attorney general’s authority to take over cases that prosecutors don’t pursue,  and the requirement that a rape or incest victim must sign an affidavit. On second reading in the House, over 80 amendments were filed, leading to hours of floor debate. The biggest discussion came over an amendment that would have deleted the exceptions for rape and incest, offered by Rep. Karen Engleman. The measure failed 61-39 with Democrats joining moderate Republicans, although a majority of House Republicans overall voted to remove the exceptions for rape and incest. Earlier today, following many hours of impassioned debate, the House passed the bill by a vote of 62-38, with nine Republicans joining all Democrats in opposing the bill. The Senate passed the bill immediately after and the Governor signed the bill into law that evening only a few hours after its passage. 

There are no changes related to your ability to provide information or resources to a client who asked you about access to abortion services in Indiana or elsewhere. It’s good to have this question on our radar though, as we expect to see bills introduced in future sessions on both sides of this issue. Let us know if you have any more questions.

FSSA News Release (July 2022)

Indiana Family & Social Services Administration (FSSA) announces new funding for mental health services and the launch of Indiana 988 for crisis response.  Click here to read the full announcement.

2022 Legislative Update (March 2022)

The Indiana legislative session moved quickly this year, and we were able to make significant progress in support of MFTs in our state.

Our first win came as we expanded telehealth authority to MFTs in training.  SEA 284, which passed unanimously and now is just awaiting the Governor’s signature, will permit graduate students in MFT programs to provide telehealth services under supervision during their training.  We know how important it is for MFTs in training to have practice with the unique clinical and ethical considerations of telehealth care, and now all students in Indiana will be able to have experience with providing telehealth care while still in their graduate programs.  We are confident this will lead to a better equipped group of future clinical professionals in our state.

Additionally, we were able to keep MFTs out of a reciprocity bill that would have created additional work for our already over-burdened licensing agency and would have duplicated a reciprocity process we already have in place in Indiana.  Simultaneously, we were able to amend the bill to require the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency to act on completed provisional license applications within 30 days.  We hope this will help reduce the current backlog of applications, allowing new MFTs in the state to move forward efficiently in their licensing process and thus increasing the number of available providers to Indiana residents.

Finally, we worked diligently throughout session on SB 226, which would have reduced training requirements for new MFTs to align with the updated COAMFTE Standards 12.5.  A few years ago, when COAMFTE made adjustments, we had to change Indiana code to match, and this year, we hoped to repeat the process, this time by reducing the total number of clinical hours to 300 (150 relational) and the total number of supervision hours to 100.  Our Legislative Chair and Associate Representative both testified in the Senate Committee Hearing early in session with success, and the bill moved out of committee with unanimous support. However, despite passing out of the Senate in the first half of session, the House Public Health chairman decided not to give the bill a hearing in the second half of session due to the number of bills assigned to his committee.

We were extremely disappointed to hear this, but we were able to have the training requirements language amended into SEA 239, a bill on practitioner identification and advertising, during the House committee process.  That bill continued through the process with full support and without any issues until 3 days before the end of session, at which point Senate general counsel ruled our language “non-germane” and removed our language from the bill. We were unable to find another home for this language before session ended, but we have heard from several legislators who have pledged to move this language for MFTs in the 2023 legislative session.

A special thanks is owed to Dant Advocacy, Inc.  Miriam Dant and Berkley Ramsey were critical to our success this session and fought tirelessly for us on SB 226.  We look forward to working with them next year to finish what we started in aligning Indiana training requirements with COAMFTE Standards.