This week, the House is expected to consider 12 bills, ranging from health care to Ukraine.
Legislation under consideration this week includes:
H.R. 311: requires the EPA to modify its Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure rule to provide an exemption for farms with a storage capacity of less than or equal to 10,000 gallons and no history of spills.
H.R. 1814: expands the Affordable Care Act’s religious conscience exemption to include individuals who have “sincerely held religious beliefs” against receiving medical care and have not received voluntary medical care over the past year. These individuals would still be allowed to receive Social Security. Currently, this exemption applies only to a limited number of religious groups and requires individuals to waive all public and private insurance benefits, including Social Security and Medicare.
H.R. 3474: exempts veterans who already receive health insurance through the Department of Veterans Affairs or reservists covered under Tricare from being counted toward the number of employees a business has for the purposes of the employer shared-responsibility requirement under the Affordable Care Act.
Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014 (H.R. 3979): clarifies that qualified services rendered as a volunteer to an eligible employer – including volunteer fire departments – do not count as employee hours of service for the purposes of the employer shared-responsibility requirement under the Affordable Care Act.
H.R. 4160: prohibits the Department of Health and Human Services from implementing proposed changes to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program. The proposed changes would reduce the number of “protected” classes of drugs that insurers must include in their plans and would limit the number of plans a single insurer can offer in a region. This proposal would save an estimated $1.3 billion over five years.
Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2013 (H.R. 3675): requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to adopt rules that define deadlines and requirements for its own procedures, and to periodically review those requirements. It also allows a bipartisan majority of FCC commissioners to meet privately under certain circumstances; currently FCC commissioners must meet in the open and with advance public notice, which can inhibit the FCC’s ability to make decisions quickly.
H.Res. 499: condemns Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity and calls on the Russian Federation to remove all of its military forces from Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
H.Res. 506: honors the life and legacy of Czechoslovakian leader and human rights activist Va’clav Havel by directing the House of Representatives Fine Arts Board to provide for the display of a bust of Va’clav Havel in the United States Capitol.
H.R. 3973: requires that all federal officials who establish or implement a policy that refrains from enforcing a federal law must report to Congress on the reason for the non-enforcement. This bill is a reaction by House Republicans to President Obama’s attempts to do what Congress won’t, including deferring action on young immigrants brought here by their parents and taking steps to implement the Affordable Care Act.
H.R. 4138: authorizes either chamber of Congress to bring a civil action against the executive branch for failure to faithfully execute existing laws.
H.R. 3189: prohibits federal agencies from requiring entities to relinquish their water rights to the U.S. government as a condition of using public lands.
H.R. 4015: formally repeals the sustainable growth rate (SGR) used to determine Medicare payment rates for physicians, and it provides for a transition to a new dual system intended to reward quality of care that would begin in 2018. Under the new system, physicians could choose to participate under one of two reimbursement methods: a Merit-Based Incentive Payment system under which doctors could get higher reimbursements based on better overall performance, or a group-oriented Alternative Payment Model system under which doctors would move away from traditional fee-for-service payments.