Democratic state Sen. Dave Koehler reflected on the end of this year’s legislative session with bills failing to pass and several others squeaked through in the final hours of before the end of the spring session.

While there will be a veto session before the new year, one of Koehler’s bills passed in the final week of session was to regulate "down coding."

The bill would stop insurance companies from underpaying for diagnostic medical tests.

Koehler, representing Bloomington-Normal and Peoria, said doctors will sometimes run multiple tests on a patient to figure out what is cause of the medical issue.

Koehler said if someone is feeling pain in their chest or stomach, for example, the doctor might run a test to see if it is a heart condition. But as they continue to test, they find out it is just acid reflux.

“[Doctors] turn the bill in of all the procedures they’ve done, and the insurance carrier, the [Managed Care Organization] gets back and says, we’ll pay for acid reflux. Well, that’s not what they had to spend to try to find out what was going on with this patient,” Koehler said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas.

Koehler said the bill will have insurance companies pay for the full cost of medical care despite the final cause of the medical issue.

Insurance companies did raise concerns that doctors would up code, or artificially increase the cost of medical procedures, but Koehler said upcoding is already illegal.

The bill goes to the governor’s desk to be signed.

Home and auto insurance

Two home and auto insurance bills will also go to the governor’s desk to be signed, allowing the Department of Insurance to stop excessive rate increases by insurance companies.

The bills would also require home insurance companies to reimburse consumers if the rates are found to be excessive.

Koehler, representing State Farm and Country Financial headquartered in Bloomington-Normal, supported the regulations on insurance companies.

He said there was a lot of compromise with the home insurance bill to make sure it protected consumers, while doing the least harm to insurance companies.

“I don’t think the insurance companies are jumping up and down about [the home insurance bill], but it was a much better compromise. On the car insurance, everybody has gone through this, where their car insurance is up. I know they had a little bit more heartburn with that,” Koehler said.

Koehler did not vote on the auto insurance bill, but said he supported it.

Not all members supported the bills. Democratic state Rep. Sharon Chung from Bloomington opposed the bill, along with some other Democrats and all House and Senate Republicans.

Koehler said he understands that State Farm and Country Financial employ a lot of people in Bloomington-Normal. He added that is why he was happy to see a compromise for the home insurance bill.

“We don’t want to harm insurers that make up a lot of families that are living within our communities,” Koehler said. “On the other hand, we don’t want just rampant costs across the industry to keep on escalating.”

Data centers

Data centers were a big issue this year as local governments started enacting moratoriums on data centers or canceling projects because of a lot of local opposition to data center construction.

People worry data centers will cause more issues like using up water, raising electricity prices, noise pollution and light pollution, which outweigh the potential economic benefits.

Illinois lawmakers did introduce a bill, the POWER Act, to regulate data centers by requiring them to disclose water consumption, and bare more of the burden when it comes to electric prices.

The bill did not get called for a vote.

Illinois lawmakers still have a veto session in October where they have two weeks to pass any bills that they did not pass before adjournment on June 1; otherwise they will have to start the whole process over next year.

Koehler said electricity, water and noise pollution are the main issues with data centers. He added he supported the POWER Act, which would require data centers to use renewable energy sources and report water consumption.

“You shouldn’t be taking drinking water out of the [Mahomet] aquifer to run a data center, so I hope that will make a difference. Unfortunately, this is not done statewide, and there was a bill that was introduced, but it didn’t really go anywhere,” Koehler said.

Koehler said the Bloomington-Normal Water Reclamation District is allowed to sell gray water [waste water from sinks and washing machines] to allow more clean water to go towards residents.

Koehler said the state can create laws surrounding electric and water consumption, but local governments still need to decide where to zone the data center to minimize the noise pollution.

“[Noise is] really an issue of trying to zone it right. Whether it’s a municipality or county, they have to zone it such that it doesn’t impose undue noise for neighbors and neighborhoods,” Koehler said.

Koehler said it is important not to be hypercritical of data centers because these buildings make it so our electronic devices work and are able to store mass information.

“It’s ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome here. If it’s done right, a data center is a good addition to any community, because in smaller communities, where they’re tending to locate, that becomes a tremendous tax base for the school system, for the counties, for the municipalities,” Koehler said.

Gov. JB Pritzker announced he was going to pause data center tax credits by executive order because the Illinois legislature did not pass such a pause in the budget.

Koehler supported the temporary pause on data center tax credits.

Estate tax

The estate tax for farmers has not changed in over a decade and has not kept up with inflation, leading to a lot of family farms having to sell land in order to pay the estate tax they might not have had to pay for only a few years ago.

Koehler introduced the bill to raise the estate tax threshold from $4-$6 million to account for inflation.

“If you start seeing more and more farms have to sell just to pay the taxes, then you’re going to see more growth in terms of corporate farming, that’s not Illinois history,” Koehler said.

Koehler said the reason the bill has not passed despite support from a lot of lawmakers is because some lawmakers want the bill to overhaul estate tax laws, not just fix one issue.

Illinois budget

Republicans said despite better communication from last year’s budget process it still went too quickly for anyone to read the final budget or properly criticize.

Koehler said there were multiple drafts of the budget starting with the governor’s proposed budget.

“They filed one draft, I think, about three days before, and they made some tweaks and filed a second draft. There were some more corrections made, and then they filed the third draft, which is the final draft that they passed,” Koehler said.

There were drafts of the budget during the final two weeks, but the final budget bill that was passed was not filed until 48 hours before the deadline with amendments to the bill happening hours before the bill passed.

Koehler said the final amendments are part of the process because of the different competing interests of lawmakers and with this year having a tight budget.

“I would say that anybody who complains that they didn’t see the budget, they weren’t looking; they didn’t take the time to really dig into it,” Koehler said.