by Rep. Tom Loertscher, R-Bone

This week in my readings a couple of things caught my eye. John Deere puts out a monthly magazine called “The Furrow” and I suppose that they send it to every farmer in the America, or at least to the ones that do business with them. There are some very thoughtful articles and of course, a lot of John Deere ads. Near the end of every issue they have a page of “Fun & Philosophy”. One of those in the last issue was under the heading of Capsule Sermons: “The greatest challenge in life is to decide what is important and to disregard everything else.” That’s a pretty good description of what happens around here.

It was reported on Thursday that Governor Otter received notice from Washington D.C. Health and Human Services (HHS) that the Dual Waiver request we were debating here would not be considered for approval. The reasoning behind the letter was that the Affordable Care Act is still in force and that no innovative plans to cover the gap population would be approved. And after all of the debate in the legislature on this matter, it came to an abrupt halt. It must not have been important to them to see an effort to address this in an Idaho way, therefore it is to be disregarded by them.

Every day is an adventure in the State Affairs Committee. On back to back days we had the debate on chemical abortion reversal (Senate Bill 1243) followed by the hearing on castle doctrine/stand your ground/justifiable homicide (Senate Bill 1313). Those were two interesting days for the committee and both were sent to the full House for action. Most interesting on the first one was a young lady who told the committee about how and why she changed her mind and had brought her five-year-old son with her that was the result of her decision. Then Planned Parenthood and the ACLU lined up to say the protocol was not scientifically proven and would not work. Hmmm. As for S1313 most interesting there was that some testified in opposition saying it was way too strong and others testifying in opposition saying it was far too weak. If that sounds strange to you, it happens here all of the time. And we get to sort it all out.

Back to The Furrow, under what they call the ‘We Aim to Please’ column is this one: “If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.” – William James (1842-1910) The good news from home is snow, especially in District 32. We have been worrying about that a lot these past weeks and sure enough our worry has not made a difference and didn’t change the amount of snow.

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