Colonmania

Last Thursday, after health insurance giant Aetna announced its somewhat less than enthusiastically received plan to prevent gastroenterologists from giving their patients full anesthesia during colonoscopies, I announced that (among other things) I would ask the General Assembly to take legislative action when it returned to session next month. You can read the original article here. Yesterday, Speaker of the House Terry Spence announced…drumroll please…exactly the same thing. You can read today’s article here. I had sometimes mused out loud to colleagues about what it would take to start bringing the House Republicans around to the cause of health insurance reform, and now I guess I have my answer: having a medical instrument inserted into their colons without full sedation.

In fairness to the Speaker, by the way, he is the only House Republican sponsor of Senate Bill 6, the bill creating a statewide health insurance purchasing pool. So if I have to be plagiarized by a House Republican, I would rather it be him than almost anyone else.