Georgia Tipsheet

The alternative to the controversial ‘hospital bed tax’ set to expire this year cleared the Senate Regulated Industries Committee yesterday, getting a ‘Do Pass’ recommendation.

The new proposal, introduced by Governor Nathan Deal’s floor leaders in the House and Senate, would shift responsibility for levying the fee away from the Legislature and to the Department of Community Health. Under the alternative proposal’s initial language, the fee would face renewal every 5 years, with an initial expiration date coming in June of 2018.

Following heated debate, the ‘bed tax’ was passed in the 2010 session and is set to expire in June of this year. It was designed to fill a $500 million void in the state’s Medicaid budget.

Filed as Senate Bill 24, it cleared the committee with support from 11 of the 14 members. The one amendment was a provision setting the expiration date “a year earlier than first proposed,” instead moving it to 2017.

“All three of the state’s major hospital organizations” back the proposal, and in testimony they cited the potential for “massive reductions in Medicaid reimbursements” as further grounds for continuing the fee In particular, rural hospitals were cited as ones that would face serious consequences.

Still, some have blasted the proposal as an abdication of responsibility by the Georgia General Assembly. The fee itself has long been met with harsh criticism from anti-tax advocates like Grover Norquist, Chairman of Americans for Tax Reform.

Newly-minted President Pro Tem David Shafer said that the bill “would not raise any revenue.”

Other detractors called attention to the proposal’s Senate introduction, citing concerns on legality. Senator David Lucas, a Democrat from Macon, called the bill a “revenue measure,” saying that all such bills had to begin in the state House.

Charlie Bethel, S.B. 24’s sponsor and one of Governor Deal’s floor leaders, countered by saying that it was a proposal centered on authority rather than revenue.

-Brandon Howell

The renewal of the ‘hospital bed tax’ is likely to prove one of the most controversial during the 2013 session of the Georgia General Assembly, but Governor Nathan Deal is set to support an alternative that would prevent lawmakers from voting for what many conservatives have dubbed a tax hike.

“Deal’s floor leaders in the House and Senate will introduce legislation today that switches the responsibility for levying the fee from the Legislature to the Department of Community Health. The move to levy a provider fee would replace the so-called bed tax on hospitals,” reads an AJC report.

Doing so may stove off what would likely be a heated debate over whether or not the fee merits renewal.

Lawmakers asked about such an alternative iterated that they had yet to see the bill, but expressed cautious optimism. House Speaker David Ralston didn’t offer a full-throated endorsement, but deemed it has potential to be a “very reasonable solution.”

The DCH already oversees such a fee for nursing homes.

Georgia is currently facing a Medicaid shortfall to the tune of $500 million; supporters say that renewal of the ‘bed tax’ or its potential alternative are crucial to filling the void and dodging “massive reductions in Medicaid reimbursements.”

The current fee is set to expire in June. Anti-tax advocates, including Grover Norquist, have gone on the record calling a vote for renewal a vote to raise taxes.

Should the alternative backed by Deal be put in place, it would require re-authorization from the governor and General Assembly ever five years.

-Brandon Howell

At a presser yesterday afternoon, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun punted when asked about swirling rumors that he will mount a primary challenge to incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss.

“This is not about a race in 2014. This is about the next two weeks. This is about the petitions that are signed here,” stated the 10th district representative, flanked by roughly 160,000 signatures imploring lawmakers not to violate anti-tax lion Grover Norquist’s pledge with a fiscal cliff vote to raise taxes.

Chambliss’s remarks surrounding the pledge are the root of the increased chatter about his receiving a challenge from the right in 2014.

For his part, Broun has left no breathing room on shunning the pledge.

“I will not cave in. I am going to vote against raising taxes on anyone. Period. So not looking forward to any particular race. This is all about just what makes sense financially for your children and your grandchildren’s future.”

Should he choose to campaign for a spot in the upper chamber, Broun would begin a race against Chambliss trailing 57-14 percent, per Public Policy Polling’s numbers released last week. Those same numbers, however, indicated that 43 percent of primary voters would like to see someone ‘more conservative’ as the party’s standard bearer come November of 2014.

-Brandon Howell

The campaign of Rep. John Barrow on Monday intimated suspect motives for one of the nation’s top anti-tax lobby for its recent decision to boost the incumbent lawmaker’s Republican challenger, Lee Anderson.

A Barrow press aide circulated yesterday morning a withering three-point review of Anderson’s time in the state legislature – a record, the aide said, that was plainly at odds with the anti-tax agenda of Americans for Tax Reform, whose independent expenditure arm went on the air this weekend with two advertisements backed by a combined half-million dollar buy. (See the two ads here and here.)

“Lee Anderson repeatedly violated ATR’s pledge when he voted for tax increases adopted by the Georgia legislature,” Richard Carbo, Barrow’s communications director on loan from DC, said in the release. “It looks as though ATR would rather support a ‘big government’ Republican who votes to raise taxes than a Democrat who votes to cut taxes.”

But ATR defended its support of Anderson with its own numerology-inspired statement, a four-point explanation why the blue dog didn’t pass muster.

The “top four reasons” for its involvement in the race, according to an ATR spokesman: Only one candidate, Anderson, signed their no-taxes-pledge; Barrow refused to denounce a Democratic ad maligning said pledge; Barrow’s a reliable Democratic vote on economic matters (stimulus, not repealing the president’s health reforms); and the $716 billion in funds necessarily siphoned from Medicare to support the president’s health program.

“John Barrow had more than enough time to denounce the proven-false claims being made against Lee Anderson on his behalf,” Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader who steers ATR, said. “Instead, he sat idly by as Democrat allies lied for him. Perhaps even worse is this idea that Barrow is not someone who tax and spend liberals in Washington count on. From the failed stimulus to the refusal to vote in favor of repealing Obamacare, Barrow has voted against the interest of Georgia for too long.”

- James Richardson

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist told Georgia state lawmakers in no uncertain terms this week that a vote to reauthorize the sunsetting hospital bed fee would violate a no-taxes pledge many had signed when first campaigning for office.

“Extension of the hospital bed tax … would kill jobs, dampen medical innovation and raise health care costs. It should be rejected,” Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told lawmakers in a letter on Wednesday. “A vote in favor of extending the bed tax is a violation of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.”

Norquist said an extension of the tax, which was passed in 2010 as a temporary budget fix, would inhibit the growth of the state’s otherwise booming health care industry.

“[H]ealth care is a booming industry in Georgia… Job growth is expected at a 38 percent rate, compared to 20 percent for all other industries,” Norquist’s letter read. “A tax hike during such a promising period of expansion in the industry would inhibit job creation just as Georgia is starting to move past the highest unemployment rate in its history, reached last year.”

Norquist warned GOP lawmakers that a vote for reauthorization would be, in his estimation, a rejection of fiscal conservative principles because the tax creates a vehicle for the state to enroll in a federal matching program for Medicaid funds.

“While hospitals in the state will be forced to cough up $216 million because of the tax increase, the heavily-indebted federal government will be on the hook for at least $200 million more,” he said. “Fiscal conservatives should not be looking to Washington for more federal aid, especially when the national debt climbed above $16 trillion for the firs time last week.”

Fifty state lawmakers, most of them Republican, have signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. The state House pledge reads in part: “I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.”

Governor Nathan Deal made the same committee to eschew tax hikes in his 2010 gubernatorial bid, though his relationship with anti-taxers, and Norquist in particular, has soured in the two years since.

When a proposed gridlock fix–a one percent transportation tax known locally as TSPLOST–went to the ballot earlier this year, Deal enlisted as the measure’s chief Republican surrogate.

Norquist quickly criticized the governor for violating the pledge, saying its adoption represented a “rather significant tax increase.” A visibly annoyed Deal countered that he had “never pledged away [his] First Amendment rights.”

The tax was ultimately defeated by ultra-wide margins in most quarters of the state despite the governor’s support.

But it wasn’t the only instance in which the two men had tangled over state affairs. In December of last year, Norquist lectured the governor and lawmakers to avoid sin taxes on alcohol, cigarettes or sweetened beverages during this year’s legislative session.

Communication between the pair, it seems, have fallen to virtual radio silence since.

Norquist, a spokesman said, had not “heard from the governor specifically on the bed tax.”

- James Richardson

Nathan Deal on Wednesday sharply rebuked his conservative critics who say the governor has abandoned a two-year-old no-tax pledge by endorsing the state’s looming transportation referendum.

Then just a candidate for governor’s mansion, Deal signed in 2010 a pledge saying he “would oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes.” Now, some–including Americans for Tax Reform, the group that holds pols accountable to the pledge–say that the governor’s support for a one percent regional tax to buoy government transportation spending is an explicit betrayal.

But Gov. Deal defended his support Wednesday night at a gathering of Atlanta fundraisers by arguing semantics: “First of all, the pledge relates to new taxes that were going to be initiated by the legislative action.”

Still the governor said he never forswore his freedom of speech.

“I never signed a pledge to give away my First Amendment rights,” Deal said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And my First Amendment rights are to advocate whatever I see fit. and as an individual, I do advocate for it.”

- James Richardson

Americans for Tax Reform President, and longtime anti-tax hike advocate, Grover Norquist waded into Georgia GOP primary waters today with an endorsement of Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers.

The basis of his endorsement? Rogers’s opposition to the transportation sales tax measure being voted on come July 31st. Per a release from Americans for Tax Reform:

The so-called ‘transportation tax’ is a more than a 7 billion dollar tax hike.  Senator Rogers knows that the problem isn’t that Georgia politicians are not raising enough in taxes.  They have been spending on areas other than transportation for years. Punishing today’s taxpayers for the bad spending decisions of yesterday’s legislators has it backwards. I am proud to have worked with Chip Rogers to bring down Georgia’s tax burden and take on special interests in both parties. He is a great leader with a bright future in the Republican Party and conservative movement.

Rogers’s primary opposition, Brandon Beach, counts himself a backer of the tax measure on the basis of improved infrastructure.

Due to the language of the endorsement, it may be of greater significance than first blush. Rogers also has the backing of Governor Nathan Deal, who has put himself openly on the line as a supporter of the sales tax. Norquist has ridiculed him for it, as Deal was a signer of his “no tax increase” pledge while in Congress. According to the AJC, the Senate Majority Leader played a strong part in getting the measure placed on the ballot, and Rogers’s lack of support comes from “the content list subsequently drawn up by local leaders”.

-Brandon Howell