Item Name | Start Time | Duration | Webcast |
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Formal House Session - February 28, 2018 | 2/28/2018 2:00 PM | 01:22:38 |
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[INAUDIBLE].
Mr. Kafker of Sharon, doubts the presence of a quorum. The Chair can ascertain that a quorum is not present. Court officers will summons the members and tell them that a quorum roll call is in progress and will remain open for three minutes.
Chair would like to recognize some visitors that we have in the chamber today to the right of the rostrum. First of all, we have visitors from Springfield. Guests of Representatives Gonzalez, Williams, and Tosado. Please welcome the Association of Black Business and Professionals, City Councilor Marcus Williams, and City Clerk Anthony Wilson. Welcome to the State House.
And we're also pleased to have with us here today the father of representative Nick Collins, former Representative Jim Collins, who is here also with former representative Royal Bolling Jr. Welcome. Have all members voted?
Mr. Kafker moves that the request for a quorum roll call be withdrawn. The chair objection, the chair has none.
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Members will please take their seats. Members will please take their seats and subdue their conversations.
Members will please take their seats and subdue their conversations. I'm very proud to welcome everyone to this historic House Chamber for this Black History Month commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of WEB Du Bois. I would also like to thank Representative Pignatelli and the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus for sponsoring this event and for their work to recognize this important milestone.
We also have some special guests, some of our friends from the Senate here today, who I also would like to welcome. Please welcome Senate President, Hariette Chandler. Senator Sonya Chang-Diaz, and Senator Joseph Boncore.
Massachusetts has been at the forefront of so many fights for freedom. Whether it was leading the charge for American independence from Britain, advancing the cause of abolition or women's rights, our state has been at the forefront.
In the years past, national and international leaders, such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King have spoken from this very podium. And just across the street, every year, many of us join together to read Frederick Douglass' famous speech on Independence Day. We do this directly below the memorial to the 54th regiment, in which African-American soldiers took the fight against slavery directly to the Confederacy.
Today we gather to recognize the life and achievements of WEB Du Bois. He was born in Great Barrington and attended the local Congregational Church. Recognizing his brilliance, the church banded together to support his education.
By age 15, he was already submitting articles to newspapers on race relations, and following his attendance at Fisk University, he returned to Massachusetts to receive his bachelor's, master's, and PhD. Massachusetts celebrates its ties to Dr. Du Bois. The main library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst is named for him.
The story of how Dr. Randolph Bromery of UMass obtained the Du Bois papers for the university and retrieved them from Egypt has the feel of real page-turner. Today we will hear from Representative Pignatelli, who represents Du Bois' hometown of Great Barrington, as well as members of our Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, and David Levering Lewis, his noted biographer. So I thank all of you for coming here today. The chair would like to now recognize the gentleman from Lawrence, representative Moran, to give remarks.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And through you to the members, I proudly rise today on the last day of Black History Month as the chair of the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus. My colleagues and I within the caucus are humbled by the opportunity and challenges of ensuring the voices of people of color across Massachusetts are heard and represented.
This is not a task we take lightly, and I appreciate the tireless work being done by our many allies and colleagues in helping us to achieve this goal. Black History Month is a chance to not only highlight and celebrate the tremendous achievement of the black community for us but also to redouble our efforts and focus on the challenges ahead for all people of color.
Heroic African-American figures have risen out of triumphing at events such as the Revolutionary War and the Civil Rights Movement, but also during some of the nation's darkest periods, like the Civil War and the fight to abolish slavery in this country once and for all. We thank these leaders not just today or even this month, but rather all year long as they play a central role in moving this country forward. Black History Month gives us an opportunity to put a special spotlight on the countless sacrifices made by civil rights pioneers, including Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks.
Today I introduce my good friend, my colleague, Rep Pignatelli, who will highlight one of Massachusetts' very own civil rights pioneer. And want to thank you all. I thank you. And have a happy Black History Month. Thank you.
Thank you, Frankie, and thank you for making me an honorary member of the Black and Latino Caucus. Thank you Mr. Speaker, for allowing us to be here today, and thank all of you for allowing us to do what's going to be a very busy day for all of us. I'd like to give a shout out to the folks from the Berkshires, who trekked down here to be here today. Thank you very much for being here.
The Speaker always thinks I'm joking when I tell him it takes me three hours to get here. So thank you very much for making that trek. And Frankie, thank you so much, for not only being a great friend, but for partnering on this adventure this month to recognize Black History Month. And I'm really humbled and honored to be here.
WEB Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, near a golden river in the Golden West of Massachusetts, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which all year long will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of WEB Du Bois' birth. I'm so honored and humbled to be from Du Bois' district and so honored to be able to bring the life and legacy of Du Bois to this historic chamber.
Our main speaker today is Dr. David Levering Lewis, a prominent American historian with a special focus on 20th century United States social history and civil rights. Dr. Lewis graduated from Du Bois' alma mater, Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his master's in history from Columbia University and earned his PhD in modern European and French history from the London School of Economics. He's lectured at the University of Ghana, taught at the University of Notre Dame, Howard University, Morgan University, and the University of the District of Columbia.
From 1985 to 2003, he served as a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. Dr. Lewis has authored eight books. Part one and part two of his biography on the life of Du Bois both won the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography, making Dr. Lewis the first author to win the Pulitzer in this category for two successive works on the same subject.
In his own words, Dr. Lewis has referred to Du Bois as, and I quote, "the whole ball of wax. Everything significant about becoming an American." Unquote. Dr. Lewis received the 2009 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama for his examinations on the life of Du Bois. He is currently teaching as a Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at New York University. Let's give a nice Massachusetts House of Representatives welcome to Dr. David Lewis.
This is a scene that is, I think, or would have been not so many years ago, unexpected. And it is overwhelmingly meaningful that it is occurring today. In this month of emancipators, as we've heard, Washington, Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass, we gather together in the people's House to honor native son, William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois, born February 23, a Sunday, 150 years ago on Church Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
The birth certificate reads William E. Du Bois, colored. Issue of Alfred Du Bois and Mary-- her Burkhardt maiden name was not mentioned-- whose February 5 nuptials in the nearby village of Housatonic the previous year had been duly noted in the Berkshire Courier. Alfred Du Bois, a Union Army veteran, who gave his birth place as Santo Domingo, Haiti, departed in rather murky circumstances soon thereafter, leaving wife and newborn in the tenuous care of Alfred's Burkhardt in-laws.
Du Bois left Great Barrington at age 17, returning during the following four score years only infrequently and usually for brief stays. Memorably, in late May of 1899, when he and his new wife, Nina, came to bury their baby son Burkhardt. Then again, in early July, 58 years later, to bury wife Nina. And again, for the last time, with the remains of daughter Yolande, before self-exile in Ghana in October 1961.
The color line was manifest in Great Barrington, Du Bois has written, and yet not absolutely drawn. Then he says, "I very early got the idea--" he would tell an interviewer from Columbia University's oral history project-- "I got the idea that what I was going to do was to prove to the world that Negroes were just like other people." Yet he sensed early that he was something of a curiosity among the white townspeople.
With that flair for drama and language in which he has few equals, Du Bois pinpoints in the souls of black folk the exact moment in his 10-year-old life, a spring day in 1878, when, as he says, "I remember well when the shadow swept across me. In a wee wooden school house, something put into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards, $0.10 a package, and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card. Refused it peremptorily.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others. Or like mayhap in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil."
In the case of a sweeping shadow and the separating veil, Du Bois has given several versions. But what is clear is that he extracted both his seminal concepts of the divided self and his powerful metaphor of the veil from his pubescent Great Barrington years. In 1880s America, not even the sons of mill owners and but the rarest daughter took college education as a matter of course.
Du Bois recalled that maybe two others in his high school graduating class of 13 were heading for college. Even his super-charged ambition at first failed to grasp the value of a college education might have for a colored man. That was High School Principal Frank Hosmer's doing.
Hosmer did more. For the unraveling Burkhardt clan's limited resources could hardly afford the college course textbooks on Greek and Latin, algebra and geometry. Classmate Lewis Rush Russell's mother, second wife of Farley Russell, a mill owner, agreed to buy them after Hosmer spoke with her.
There were seven boys and six girls in Willie's June 1884 graduation class. His mother and other Burkhardts heard him deliver an oration on Wendell Phillips, the conscience of New England abolitionism. It was the success of the evening, the Berkshire Courier reporter judged, that William E. Du Bois, a colored lad who has good standing, gave an excellent oration and provoked repeated applause.
But he was not going to Harvard. Not even to Williams College. Money remained the big problem, of course. But Principal Hosmer arranged for-- as we've heard-- for congregational churches to pledge $25 each for four years to underwrite Du Bois' education at Fisk University, a congregational school for Negroes in Nashville, Tennessee.
Harvard was not lost. The thought never occurred to him. Merely adjourned. Du Bois was off to Fisk University. For him, it was a great adventure into the unknown. His memory of his first dining hall supper he carried to his grave. At age 92, he would animatedly tell the Columbia University Oral History Project interviewer of meeting Lena Horne's aunt. "She was beautifully dressed. Oh, a perfectly lovely girl." No Fisk woman would ever refuse his card because he was black. Graduating with highest honors after three brilliant years at Fisk, Great Barrington's Brown Ambassador entered Harvard College in September of 1888.
Harvard and Yale traditionally required African-American baccalaureates to repeat a portion of their undergraduate training before pursuing graduate degrees, a requirement frequently imposed on white graduates of undistinguished colleges. Helped by a bequest from his mysterious father's father and a college scholarship, Du Bois entered Harvard College as a junior, the sixth of his race to do so. He graduated magna cum laude with a concentration in philosophy under William James in the class of 1890.
Remarkably, a special scholarship permitted matriculation at Germany's premier university, Friedrich Wilhelm University, where Du Bois came within months of earning a coveted doctorate in economics. He would, however, be the first of his race to win a Harvard doctorate in 1896. He haughtily allowed later that it was a consolation prize for having been denied the few additional months needed to return to the States with a prized German degree.
His 1896 history dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States was an immediate classic, the first history monograph published in Harvard's new historical series. The Philadelphia Negro, 1899, was recognized as a methodological breakthrough in the social sciences.
But a score of years after departing his birthplace, William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois, renowned as a scholar and what today we call a public intellectual, achieved an unparalleled eminence with the publication in 1903 of a collection of 14 bombshell essays that could only be described as sui generis. The Souls of Black Folk explained Americans of color to themselves with a saliency that still inspires and defines today.
The 35-year-old author was the first to grasp the international implications of the struggle for racial justice, memorably proclaiming at the dawn of the century that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. He was a principal founder of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights association, created 109 years ago this month, and whose militant monthly, The Crisis Magazine, he edited as the voice of uncompromising racial equality for a quarter century.
No exaggeration to state that a majority of literate African-American households were weaned on Du Bois' monthly, even those beholden to the adversary legacy of Booker Washington. A Du Bois bibliography runs to 16 pioneering books of sociology, history, politics, and race relations. In his 70s, he found time to finish a second autobiography, the splendid Dusk of Dawn, And to produce three large historical novels, complementing the two large works of fiction written in the first two decades of the 20th century that anticipated the so-called Harlem Renaissance.
All Americans owe Du Bois a considerable debt for the historical masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935, which changed forever our understanding of the shameful suppression of racial democracy in the post-Civil War South. The long march from the Supreme Court's Plessy v Ferguson's separate but equal equivocation in 1896 to Brown v Board's mandate for integration in 1954 would have been even longer and harder without his mind and pen.
Du Bois cut an amazing swath through four continents. He institutionalized the Pan-African movement, was a Lenin Peace Prize Laureate, and his birthday was once a national holiday in China. A new edition of The Souls of Black Folk is forthcoming this month. Properly so because this book is both timeless while being also time-bound.
Like the public's immutable memory of Martin Luther King's "Dream" speech, so its vivid retention of Du Bois' color line prophesy has meant that the evolved ideas, both of Du Bois and King, in their last years, are forgotten, unknown, deemed subversive, or all of the above. We should probably not expect to see the release of a new edition of In Battle for Peace, Du Bois' account of his 1952 Justice Department indictment trial and embarrassed acquittal in Washington as a foreign agent.
In one of his last jeremiads, before exiling himself to Ghana, he called for a restoration of democracy in America. He said, make it again possible for the people to express their will. Today, he said, the rich and the powerful rulers of America divide themselves into Republicans and Democrats in order to raise millions of dollars to buy the next election and prevent you from having a third party to vote for or to stop war, theft, and murder by your votes.
Massachusetts born and bred, Du Bois criticized his country's shortcomings as much from a youthful Calvinist's intolerance of moral slothfulness as from an aged Marxist's impatience with the rigged outcomes of unregulated capitalism. Famous at 50, Du Bois often claimed that his death was practically requested at 75.
He dismissed Brown v Board's all-deliberate speed, timetable, as fraudulent, and he characteristically looked upon the ultimate value of citizenship for people of color in America with the greatest misgivings if that citizenship were to mean that the peoples of Africa and Asia were to become subjects under a pox Americana, maintained for the profit of the military industrial financial complex.
Martin Luther King Jr. Famously told a capacity Carnegie Hall audience on the centenary of Du Bois' birth that it was never possible to know where the scholar Du Bois ended and the organizer Du Bois began. The two qualities in him were, said King, a single, unified force. History cannot ignore Dr. Du Bois, King insisted. Yet, when Martin Luther King spoke these words five years after Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana Du Bois had been virtually excised from his country's mainstream narrative as an expatriate and a communist.
Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking, Dr. King went on to say, and he reminded his audience that Abraham Lincoln had warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. The old contrarian's death had come, indeed, just as Dr. King prepared to deliver his "Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963. The generational baton had passed that day with stunning symbolic appropriateness. Six weeks after his 1968 Carnegie Hall centenary tribute to Du Bois, Martin Luther King died from a sniper's bullet.
To be sure, Du Bois 20th century problem was a color line, actually, without color, for it was starkly black and white. But our century is on its way to being brown and yellow as well as black and minority white. Still, as Du Bois might well have argued, to concede that a historic racial dyad has yielded to a polychrome present does not mean that race has been transcended as a potent force in our national life.
By the time of his well-timed exit, Du Bois had repeatedly proclaimed in so many words that the cash line was the cardinal problem of the age. The real problem of the century, therefore, he said, was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth. And a clairvoyant Du Bois feared greatly that the odds increasingly favored the manipulations of the rich.
Were he with us this afternoon, Du Bois would almost certainly discern in the shortcomings of the last US presidential administration the toxic persistence of race. In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama had channeled the e. pluribus unum mythos of American exceptionalism as seldom before by a credible public figure. Not only did he minimize the significance of political labels, but racism was seen as an old problem that the candidate's generation could refute and even move beyond.
Racism, quote, "was subject to refutation," Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, his ambitious campaign book. Yet what can now be sadly conceded is that a redeeming vision of a national post-racial reset succumbed to the nightmare of worsening disparities now almost irrevocably color coded by Supreme Court majorities disingenuously marking African-American and Latino voting rights and castrating what's left of organized labor by a reborn nativism more virulent than its mid-19th century parents and by criminal justice system irregularities perceived as outrageous enough to spark corrective riots.
Paradoxically, the 44th president's game endeavor to bypass those dilemmas of race, ethnicity, and wealth exposed in Du Bois' foundational text ended by delivering a confused democracy to a racist oligarchy presided over by a narcissistic aberration. The vital center did not hold, and the angry fringe prevailed November 2016.
In his long, turbulent career, great Barrington's native son attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of racism. First had come culture and education for the elites, then the ballot for the masses, then economic democracy. And decade by decade, finally, all these solutions in the service of global racial parity and economic justice. No doubt he was precipitous in totally writing off the market economy. Even so, it may be suggested that Du Bois was right to insist that to leave the solution of systemic social problems exclusively to the market is an agenda guaranteeing obscene economic inequality in the short run and inescapable political gridlock and confusion in the long run.
Du Bois intended that his life would exemplify the American race problem. Shortly before his death, he confessed that but for the race problem, he might have become, he said, an unquestioning worshipper in the shrine of the established social order into which I was born. But just that part of this order which seemed to most of my fellows nearest perfection seemed to me most inequitable and wrong. And starting from that critique, I gradually, as the years went by, found other things to question.
In contrast to the political profile of most lives then, Du Bois, at age 95, was more radically reformist than virtually any other engaged intellectual, black or white, of the 20th century. 150 years late, as the inspiring month-long embrace by the citizens of Representative Pignatelli's Great Barrington, and this most significant legislative sesquicentennial homage attest, surely it is time both to comprehend the flaws of William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois and to prize his genius. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Professor Lewis. First let me say how grateful we all are at the participation of University of Massachusetts Amherst, along with the UMass Amherst libraries, in this commemoration of WEB Du Bois and the 150th anniversary of his birth. As you know, the WEB Du Bois papers are housed at UMass in Amherst. They, the library, have lent to the State House an exhibit highlighting the life and work of WEB Du Bois, which has been here this month on the fourth floor and has been brought down to be mounted immediately outside the chamber for this event today.
We also thank the WEB Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst and the University of Massachusetts Press for giving each of us legislators, which should, if they have not arrived yet, will be arriving in days, a copy of their new edition of WEB Du Bois' most celebrated work, The Souls of Black Folk. We now end these moments together with doing something that is traditional in black communities since 1900, and that is singing the hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
These words were written by James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was a lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, novelist and poet, and civil rights activist, a contemporary-- although in his shortened life-- of WEB Du Bois and was the first African-American Executive Secretary of the NAACP. In 1900, at the age of 29, 35 years after the end of slavery in this nation, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond wrote the music to this hymn, were teachers at Stanton School, a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, where James Weldon Johnson had been born.
And they had gathered the students for a special celebration. And that special celebration was to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln on February 12, 1900. If you can imagine, this was the end of Reconstruction. And so about the only people in the Deep South who celebrated Abraham Lincoln's birthday were African-Americans.
And these two brothers had invited a great-- for them-- African-American educator to come and speak to their students. And they wrote this song as an introduction that the 500 students at this segregated school could sing in welcoming Booker T. Washington to the school to speak.
In his autobiography, Along This Way, years later, Johnson wrote about these words and this tune that had spread throughout the black communities of America and become known as the Negro national anthem. And he wrote, when we remark how remarkable that popularity was, and the only comment we can make is that we wrote better than we knew.
One final connection to Great Barrington. James Weldon Johnson and his wife, Grace Neil, at the height of his popularity, decided to buy a summer home in Great Barrington in 1926. And it is there where much of James Weldon Johnson's work was composed. In a house with a writing cabin that exists today, called Five Acres on Alfred Road.
And so to lead us-- and I mean us-- in the singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," we are so happy to have the choir director from St. Mark Congregational Church, Adam Littlejohn, with us today. And so that we will follow the tradition that those of you who have been to these events of the black community know till today, we will all stand for the singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
Is this on? Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Good afternoon.
Today you all are going to be a choir. And I'm going to direct you in the song, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." On the first verse, I'm going to sing it for you, so you have the melody. And then on the second and the last verse, we'll all sing it together.
(SINGING) Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. Ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies. Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun our new day begun. Let us march on till victory is won.
Let's all try the second and the last verse. Ready? And--
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears have been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered. Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years, god of our silent tears. Thou who has brought us thus far on the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light. Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places of God where we met thee. Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.
Not bad.
[LAUGHTER]
There will be a reception if people have a moment to greet our speaker next door in room 350. Thank you very much.
Report of committee. The Committee on Rules reports recommending that the resolutions filed by Mr. Pignatelli of [INAUDIBLE] and other members of the House, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois. Committee on Rules reports recommending their resolutions ought to be adopted.
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Mr. Pignatelli of Lee moves suspension of the rules. All those in favor, say aye. Opposed, no. The ayes have it. The rules are suspended. Question comes on adoption of the resolutions. All those in favor, say aye. Opposed, no. The ayes have it. The resolutions are adopted.
House will be in a brief recess.
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House will be in order. Chair has been informed that Senate 2296 has been released by the Committee on Bills on third reading. Miss Hogan of Stow now moves suspension of the rules. All those in favor, say aye, all those opposed, nay. The ayes have it. Rules are suspended. Third reading of the bill.
An act to protect the confidential health care, Senate number 2296 amended.
Question now is on passing the bill to being gross. Chair recognizes Miss Hogan of Stow.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and through you to the members. I rise today in support of Senate bill 2296, an act to protect access to confidential health care. This bill, commonly referred to as the Patch Act, will close a loophole in health care privacy laws that allow sensitive health information to be inadvertently shared with the primary subscriber of a health plan.
The loophole is this. As the primary subscriber of a health plan, you cannot call a doctor or a hospital to obtain specific information about the care of your spouse or adult child that's on your health plan. HIPAA laws would not allow that doctor to release that information to you. However, that information is sent to you in a summary of payments or better known as an explanation of benefits after the fact. This bill aims to protect patient privacy by closing that loophole and creating methods by which patients can obtain their own summary of payments form.
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Chair is-- what purpose did the lady rise? Chair can ascertain that. Chair will respectfully ask the members to please take their seats, subdue their conversation. Court officers clear the back of the chamber. Please take your seats. Chair recognizes Mr. Hogan of Stow.
This bill does not change the way in which people can access or consent to care. It only closes a loophole in division of insurance regulations. This bill does not change Massachusetts' minor consent laws, nor does it change parents' access to information about their minor child's health care in any way.
This bill in no way changes the circumstances under which minors may consent to their own health care without the consent of a parent or legal guardian. Currently, when a patient seeks medical care, there is a form called a summary of payments or explanation of benefits which details the type and costs of services received. This form is typically sent to the primary subscriber of the health plan.
Sensitive health information is frequently disclosed in an SOP or Summary of Payments explanation of benefits, violating the basic right to privacy guaranteed by HIPAA for anyone enrolled as a dependent on another person's policy. The disclosure of confidential health information affects all people, but particularly adult spouses covered as dependents on a partner's plan and young adults, 18 to 26, who are insured on their parent's or guardian's plan.
We know that maintaining confidentiality is critically important for patients seeking care related to sexual and reproductive health, domestic violence or sexual assault, and mental health or substance abuse disorders. We also know that the failure to obtain care has serious consequences, such as unplanned pregnancies, delayed access to prenatal care, the spread of STIs, deteriorating mental health conditions, and continued substance abuse.
There are situations where a patient fears disclosure of care to an abusive partner or disclosure of family planning services to a parent. And that fear may deter them from seeking care altogether, leading to higher health costs down the road. Such fear may also prevent a patient from sharing with their doctor the context or causes of the health conditions for which they are seeking treatment, opening the door for incorrect diagnosis and missed opportunities for prevention and treatment.
The Patch Act will address the problems many patients face by closing this loophole in confidentiality. Specifically, the bill will allow patients to choose their preferred method of receiving an SOP, and that will not be necessary every time you access care. This changes how you receive the SOP.
It will eliminate a summary of payments when no remaining balance exists on a claim. It will require that a summary of payment would provide generic information only, such as office visit or medical care. It would also ensure that patients are informed of their options to request confidential means of receiving an SOP, and it would require the Division of Insurance and the Department of Public Health to educate providers and patients on these protections.
This policy is so critical that in April of 2017, the Massachusetts Division of insurance issued a bulletin which required Mass DOI to develop a common summary of payment form by which commercial health insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield, health maintenance organizations, be issued at the member level rather than to the primary subscriber of the health plan. And it could be issued via paper or electronic means.
Carriers-- and that's important to understand-- carriers were required to come into compliance with this bulletin February of this year, which is this month. The bill before you today would codify this important policy into state law. So we're taking the Mass Division of Insurance policy and codifying it today.
Establishing and ensuring a new level of confidentiality will alleviate patients' fear of being punished or stigmatized for the health care decisions they make. Most importantly, it will empower patients to take control of their care and hopefully lead to better health outcomes for our commonwealth. Closing this loophole-- and it is a loophole is important-- to the essential patient privacy.
I would like to thank the 105 legislators who have co-sponsored this bill, believing that patient confidentiality is the cornerstone of an effective health care system. I would like to thank the Senate sponsor, the gentlelady from Ashland, for her leadership on this issue. The gentlelady from Swansea for her abiding support of this bill. I would also like to thank the dozens of providers and advocates and community-based organizations that make up the Patch Alliance, and in particular, Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund, Health Care For All, as well as Patch Supporters Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans.
Your dedication and advocacy during the past several years have been instrumental in bringing this bill forward to the finish line. And Mr. Speaker, I ask that when a vote be taken, it be taken by a call of the yeas and nays. Thank you.
Miss Hogan of Stow asked when the matter is taken, it be taken by a call of the yeas and nays. Those joining with her will rise, and monitors return the count. First division, five. Second division, 13. Third division. Sufficient number have arisen, when the matter is taken, it will be taken by a call of the yeas and nays.
The question now is on passing the bill to being gross, pending Miss Orrall of Lakeville offers an amendment in the hands of the clerk. The clerk will read the amendment.
Amendment number four. Miss Orrall of Lakeville moves to amend the bill by inserting the following new section. Nothing in this act shall supersede any general or special law related to the informed consent of minors.
Question now is on the amendment. All those in favor, say aye. All those opposed, nay. The ayes have it. The amendment is adopted. Question now is on passing the bill to being gross, pending which Mr. Lombardo of Bellerica offers an amendment in the hands of the clerk. The clerk will read the amendment.
Amendment number five. Mr. Lombardo of Bellerica moves to amend the bill by inserting text of chapter 176-O, section 27, paragraph E, lines 39 to 45.
If there be no objection, the clerk will dispense with reading the paper. Chair hears none. The question is on the amendment. All those in favor, say aye, all those opposed, nay. The nays have it. The amendment is not adopted.
Question now is on-- question now is on engrossment. Roll call having been ordered. The roll call machine is now open and will remain open for three minutes. Court officers summon the members. Indicate a roll call is in progress.
The House will be in order. The clerk will make an announcement.
The voting stations for representatives Kahn, Miceli, and Chris Walsh are locked.
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House will be in order. House will be in order. Chair would like to take this opportunity to introduce, to the right of the rostrum, Dominican Republic Delegation from the Chamber of Accounts. Chamber of Accounts. Doctor Hugo Alvarez Perez, President of the Chamber, Carlos Diaz, Secretary of the Chamber of Accounts. Attorney Jesus de La Cruz, Communications Director, attorney Carlin Sosa, Administrator of Finance, attorney Margarita [? Corcoran, ?] member of the Chamber of Accounts and [INAUDIBLE] Assessor of Membership. And they're the guests of Representative Frank Moran. Welcome to the House of Representatives.
Have all members voted who wish to do so? Have all members voted who wish to do so? Time for voting has expired. The clerk will display the tally. On this matter, 138 members voted in the affirmative, 14 in the negative. The bill is passed to be engrossed. House will be in a brief recess.
Mr. Homer of Boston asks unanimous consent to be recorded in the last roll call. Does the chair object? Chair has none.
On roll call number 313, Russell Holmes. Yes?
[POUNDS GAVEL]
Members will please take their seats. As we continue to grieve for Chairman Kocot and celebrate his life and his immense contributions to the Commonwealth, I ask that we now honor our good friend with a moment of silence. Thank you.
House will be in a brief recess.
Mr. Mariano, Quincy, offers an order in the hands the clerk, which the clerk will read.
Order that when the House adjourns today, it will adjourn and meet tomorrow at 11 o'clock AM.
Question comes to adoption of the order. All those in favor, say aye. Opposed no. The ayes have it. The order is adopted.
Speaker DeLeo of Winthrop moves that when the House adjourns today, it do so in respect of the memory of Peter V. Kocot, a member of the House from Northampton from 2002 to 2018 inclusive. Question comes on that motion. All those in favor, say aye. Opposed no. The ayes have it.
Mr. Hill of Ipswich now moves that the House do now adjourn, to meet Thursday next at 11 AM in an informal session. Question comes on that motion. All those in favor, say aye. Opposed, no. The ayes have it. The motion is adopted. The House now stands adjourned to meet tomorrow at 11 AM in an informal session.
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