Legislative opponents of certificate of need laws are confident. This may be the year they prevail against the restrictive health-care regulations. But opposition from the powerful hospital lobby remains. Hospitals claim competition would hurt their bottom line. It would place hospitals, especially rural ones, at risk of closing, they say. Charity care they must provide...
Top-ranking senators have introduced an omnibus health-care bill that would add severely disabled people to the Medicaid rolls and abolish restrictive certificate of need laws. Sens. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, and Dan Bishop, R-Mecklenburg, discussed Senate Bill 361, The Health Care Expansion Act of 2019, at a March 26 news conference. It also would create a...
The 125 employees at the car dealership Senate Marjority Leader Harry Brown owns could get cheaper health insurance if Senate Bill 86 becomes law. So could thousands of other people working at small companies, along with self-employed workers. The Small Business Healthcare Act, as S.B. 86 is known, would help small businesses with fewer than...
A Senate plan to pump $2.03 billion of tax revenue into K-12 public school construction would both outspend a competing House plan and do so with cash rather than debt, Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown, R-Onslow, said Wednesday. Brown, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Senate Bill 5, Building North Carolina’s Future, is a...
Female genital mutilation isn’t illegal in North Carolina, but a group of senators are introducing a bill to change that for girls younger than 18. State Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, announced Jan. 30 she’s sponsoring a bill to ban the FGM on minors. North Carolina is one of 23 states that hasn’t yet made the...
North Carolina’s new voter ID law is headed to court. This week the N.C. General Assembly overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s Dec. 14 veto of Senate Bill 824, Implementation of Voter I.D. Constitutional Amendment. Now, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the N.C. NAACP are suing over allegations of racial discrimination and burdens on voting...
A team of former federal special agents with a rich background investigating public corruption and fraud will dig through documents and interview members of Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration to determine whether his $57.8 million Atlantic Coast Pipeline discretionary fund was a political pay-to-play scheme. “This matter is not a criminal matter so far as we...
With little debate, the N.C. Senate Thursday morning sent Senate Bill 854, the measure implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls, to Gov. Roy Cooper. The vote to concur with the amended House version of the bill was 25-7. Unlike the House debate on the measure, which was heated...
WINSTON-SALEM — Shawn and Cindy Weeks would like nothing more than to move. They’ve outgrown their house, on a quarter acre in Winston Salem, but can’t find a buyer. It comes down, really, to one law, which removed basic property rights and left homeowners in real estate purgatory. The Weeks’ property is in the path...
