This story was originally published on Minnesota Reformer. [1]
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Lawmakers tussling over more than the state budget — essential worker pay and reinsurance also up in the air
By:   ['J. Patrick Coolican Is Editor-In-Chief Of Minnesota Reformer. Previously', 'He Was A Capitol Reporter For The Minneapolis Star Tribune For Five Years', 'After A Knight-Wallace Fellowship At The University Of Michigan', 'Time At The Las Vegas Sun', 'Seattle Times', 'A Few Other Stops Along The Way. He Lives In St. Paul With His Wife', 'Toddler Son.', 'J. Patrick Coolican']
Date: None

The Minnesota Legislature continues to labor toward final agreements on a two-year, $52 billion budget deal, spread out over about a baker’s dozen major bills. Currently, none of them have been passed and signed by Gov. Tim Walz since a special legislative session convened Monday. Government agencies without funding by June 30 will shut down.

But the Democratic-Farmer-Labor majority House and Republican-controlled Senate are also engaged in fierce negotiations over two other issues.

The first is premium pay and/or paid time off for essential workers who had to quarantine or suffered from COVID-19 and had to use unpaid time off.

The second is re-upping authorization of a program called reinsurance, which pays off the most expensive claims of health insurance companies, which its advocates say has stabilized the individual insurance market since the Legislature passed it in 2017.

The former is a priority for the DFL and its labor allies, the latter for Republicans.

A source with knowledge of the negotiations says a deal is at hand on both, “pending details being worked out.”

A spokesman for Gov. Tim Walz declined to comment. House Speaker Melissa Hortman said, “Stay tuned.” A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans said she could not confirm any deal in the works.

The legislation to help workers who suffered loss of income and paid time off during the pandemic — authored in the House by Rep. Frederic Frazier, DFL-New Hope — is complex, dealing with influential lobbies like the Minnesota Hospital Association and labor unions like SEIU. It seeks to help those who were left out of federal legislation guaranteeing paid time off during the pandemic. This includes private entities of more than 500 workers, first responders and health care workers, who were left without paid leave by federal legislation despite the risks of COVID-19 infection and frequent need to quarantine.

Smaller entities of fewer than 500 workers were given a tax credit, which they can secure immediately by not having to pay Medicare payroll taxes, in exchange for providing paid medical leave. The DFL and its allies would like to compel them to do so.

Brian Elliott, the executive director of the SEIU Minnesota State Council, said the worker coalition, which also includes nurses and educators, is focused on “making these workers whole who had to burn through their own (paid time off), and in many cases take unpaid time off to care for someone or themselves or had to quarantine.”

SEIU workers include janitors and security officers at large commercial buildings, many of them employed by big companies that were exempted from the federal mandate of paid time off for COVID-19 illness and quarantining.

The bill would apply to hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans who wound up ineligible for paid time off during the pandemic.

Republicans are said to be more interested in using some of the $2.8 billion American Rescue Plan received by Minnesota to give essential workers premium pay, but that gets expensive quickly unless the checks are trivial. For instance, $1,000 to 500,000 workers would be $500 million.

State Sen. Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, who authored a companion bill to the Frazier House measure, said, “We’re continuing to fight” to win the benefits for people who need them.

Without a deal on essential work paid time off, reinsurance — a Republican priority — will likely remain stuck in place.

The House DFL and Senate GOP have agreements on smaller budget bills like commerce and energy, agriculture, higher education and the Legacy Amendment money that goes to clean water and other environmental funding and the arts.

But House Republicans are currently filibustering those bills. They hope to force Democrats to support reinsurance, which Republicans say is necessary to keep health care affordable for people on the individual insurance market.

[1] Url: https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/lawmakers-tussling-over-more-than-the-state-budget-essential-worker-pay-and-reinsurance-also-up-in-the-air/