House isn't close to meeting its deadline

It's going to be tough for the House to meet its self-imposed deadline of midnight Thursday to get all budget bills approved by conference committees, Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher said Wednesday.

"We clearly don't have [budget] targets on health and human services, higher ed or K-12," said Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis. "I don't know that we can get to agreement by [tonight]." But she said the House is far enough ahead of the game that "we can recover from missing this deadline."

The tax bill, which provides the revenue for spending in those bills, is far from complete, making final agreement on spending bills difficult. The tax conference committee met Wednesday night to continue hammering out differences between the Senate and House bill, taking up the issue of whether Minnesota should offer a tax credit for rehabilitaton of historic structures.

The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn on May 18, and the prospect of a special session to take care of unfinished business appears to be growing as the days wind down with major bills still being negotiated.

On Wednesday, the House moved through a flurry of bills on issues from lost cell-phone liability to health care and human services.

Predatory STOLI practices

After a similar vote in the Senate the day before, the House unanimously passed legislation to prevent so-called stranger-originated life insurance (STOLI) practices.

During hearings, one lawmaker had called the practice "perverse" while others described it as "nothing more than a wager on human life" that targeted elderly victims who did not have long to live.

In a key provision of the new proposal, no one who takes out an insurance policy could enter into an agreement to effectively sell the policy to another party until four years had passed.

The bill was closely watched by lobbyists representing the life settlement industry, who argued that actual cases of predatory STOLI practices were infrequent. In many instances, they said, legitimate life settlement contracts offered a chance for elderly people who can no longer afford to pay their premiums a chance to sell their life insurance policies for financial gain.

Developing 'nanny state'?

Also Wednesday, the House passed a bill to protect consumers against any liability for charges rung up by someone using a stolen cell phone, over the objections of some who called the bill another sign of the developing "nanny state."

Perhaps the most contentious debate came during discussion of the omnibus health care and human services policy bill, which passed 90-24.

Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, proposed an amendment seeking to overhaul the way state health-care services are provided. It called for a system that would pay for costs as they come up rather than using the current lump sum approach, he said, saving the state millions over the years.

The amendment also required the state to pay market costs for health services as opposed to the reduced prices it does now, something that would please hospitals and halt the shifting of unpaid health care costs to consumers, Gottwalt said.

But DFLers said they had too many questions about the amendment, and it failed 72-60.