Christine Jordan Sexton
Nursing bills are becoming health care trains in the Florida Senate.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is poised to add two House health care priorities to CS/CS/SB 532, when it meets Thursday: direct primary care and site selection for new veteran nursing homes or HBs 7047 and 7045, respectively. Both bills were developed by the House Health Innovation Subcommittee.
The underlying bill is filed by Sen. Denise Grimsley and it allows advanced registered nurse practitioners to order medications for patients in hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, or mobile surgical facilities.
This is the second nursing bill that will become a train in the Senate this week and both are filed by Grimsley. The first bill, CS/CS SB 614 was amended by the Senate Rules Committee earlier in the week. Sen. Don Gaetz used that measure to tag on controversial step therapy language sought by the Florida Medical Association but opposed by the insurance industry. An attempt to tag another amendment onto the bill to add the direct primary care proposal as well as language regarding medical tourism — which is the substance of SB 7084 by the Senate Health Policy Committee and Sen. Aaron Bean — was beaten back.
Grimsley agreed to put the direct primary care onto her second nursing bill and also added the nursing home language. But the medical tourism provisions are being cut out. Medical tourism still is in the House version of the direct primary care bill, HB 7045, but the issue isn’t finding any support in the Senate.
