Your Representatives in the News

State Assembly Representative Garey Bies

The state Senate passed two of Bies’s bills – Assembly Bill 352, which allows people to put noncommercial net pens (used for raising fish) in navigable waterways; and Senate Bill 223, which prohibits employers, education institutions and landlords from accessing or observing personal internet accounts of employees, students or tenants.

“Right now, nothing would stop an employer, university, or landlord from requiring an individual to disclose their private passwords for their social media accounts,” Bies said. “Providing this information means they also have access to the accounts of others in your social network who haven’t provided consent.”

Source:  Bies press release, AB 352

State Senator Frank Lasee

The Senate Financial Institutions and Rural Issues Committee passed Senate Bill 236, a bill to allow dairy farmers to sell unpasteurized milk directly to consumers at a farm. Lasee was one of the three committee members to vote for the bill, which heads to the Senate for a vote.

Source:  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Governor Scott Walker

Walker announced plans to delay moving more than 70,000 state residents off of Medicaid for three months. Earlier this year, Walker refused to take Federal money to expand Wisconsin’s Medicaid program while adding 82,000 childless adults below the federal poverty line to BadgerCare.

“The failure of the Obamacare rollout is precisely why I didn’t take the Medicaid expansion in the first place,” Walker said. “People who are taking the Medicaid expansion are depending on the federal government living up to their commitment, a federal government that can’t even get a website up and going.”

Source:  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

U.S. Representative Reid Ribble

In response to the troubles with healthcare.gov, the website set up to purchase insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, Ribble called for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down from her position.

“If you’re in charge of bringing in one of the biggest laws we’ve had in a generation, effectively taking over 18 percent of our economy, you claim it’s going to be on time, you’re given warnings that it isn’t and then you do it anyway, I think people should be held responsible,” he said.

Source:  Sheboygan Press

State Senator Tammy Baldwin

Baldwin introduced the Women’s Health Protection Act with five other members of Congress to prohibit laws that impose “burdensome requirements on access to reproductive health services such as requiring doctors to perform tests and procedures that doctors have deemed unnecessary or preventing doctors from prescribing and dispensing medication as it is medically appropriate,” according to a Baldwin press release.

“In Wisconsin and in states across the country, politicians have been standing between women and their doctors, restricting the choices women can make regarding their own reproductive health,” Baldwin said.

Source:  Baldwin press release

State Senator Ron Johnson

On Thursday, Nov. 14, Johnson said President Barack Obama’s plan to allow Americans to remain on their health insurance plans was too late.

“Unfortunately, the implementation of Obamacare has ground on to the point that millions of plans that already have been canceled cannot be reinstated,” he said.

Johnson had introduced a bill that would grandfather current plans with the Affordable Care Act. He plans to introduce another similar bill.

Source:  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

President Barack Obama

On Thursday, Nov. 14, Obama announced that insurers can extend their insurance polices they had canceled for failing to meet the Affordable Care Act’s requirements by a year.

“We fumbled the rollout on this health care law,” he said. “Am I going to have to do some work to rebuild confidence around some of our initiatives? Yeah.”

Source:  Wall Street Journal