In mid-March, leaders in the Louisiana House of Representatives plan to hold a meeting that might look a lot like a one-day special session to discuss legal issues driving insurance costs. Except no votes will be taken.
According to House Civil Law and Procedure Chair Nicholas Muscarello, the plan is for a “committee of the whole,” in which he will present potential legislation to the House chamber, representing months of work by his committee and others who are seeking ways to lower auto insurance rates.
The exact number of bills, and the full list of topics covered, is still to be determined. One subject Muscarello cites is the Housley Presumption, which states that if there’s a reasonable connection between an accident and a medical condition, there is a presumption that the accident caused the condition if the symptoms began with the accident.
House Bill 24 by Rep. Michael Melerine from last year’s regular session sought to remove the presumption, but was bottled up in committee.
Also potentially on the agenda will be the state’s hotly contested collateral source rules, which deal with evidentiary rules about the sticker price of a medical procedure versus the actual price the accident victim paid. Melerine also sought to address that issue with House Bill 423, which passed before falling victim to Gov. Jeff Landry’s veto pen.
“I envision this just being me and my committee getting up to the dais and presenting what we’ve come up with,” Muscarello says. “It’s kind of been my theory that we have to get very uncomfortable and bring up everything that we think moves the needle on insurance. … I’m going to present everything that we discovered, and, of course, the body will have to determine how they want to deal with it.”
Muscarello expects his Senate counterparts, who have been working on the same issues, to conduct a similar presentation, perhaps in conjunction with the House or separately, but he wasn’t sure of the details.
Senate President Cameron Henry and Judiciary A Chair Greg Miller, whose committee has the most overlap with House Civil Law in the upper chamber, could not immediately be reached for this column.
But in a recent interview with LaPolitics, Miller likewise said that legal issues thought to be possible drivers of insurance costs, and collateral source rules specifically, will be hot topics this year.
“There were a lot of bills that didn’t make it through the system that I think we’ll see again,” Miller says.
In a fiscal-focused session in which lawmakers are limited to five nonfiscal bills, the committees dealing with civil law won’t be as busy as they were this year. But there still could be bills with the potential to kick up some controversy.
Last year, lawmakers debated measures related to liability around vaccines and vaccine mandates, and Miller says that topic may come up again. His committee typically sees bills related to child support and custody, evidence, and succession procedures; this year likely will be no different.
And of course there are always cleanup bills related to previous legislation, Muscarello notes. And he’s considering legislation to launch a pilot program to address a shortage of court reporters.
North Dakota is considering moving toward AI-generated court transcriptions, and Muscarello says he may propose letting courts here try something similar on a voluntary basis.
“We’re not trying to put anybody out of business or hurt any profession,” he says. “In 10 years, the landscape’s going to be changed and we need to be prepared for that.”
