BY DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

This is part one of a two-part roundup of several bills planned for Kentucky’s 2025 legislative session by legislators in Southcentral Kentucky.

Region legislators are planning bills to lower the state income tax; mandate certain exemptions to the health insurance company practice known as prior authorization; update education accountability testing; enable non-state agencies to issue drivers licenses; and encourage silent alarm systems that enhance school safety.

The Kentucky General Assembly’s 2025 legislative session, Jan. 7 to March 28, is what’s known as a short session, which occurs every other year. The legislature will not create its biennial budget bills, which are passed in even-numbered years; moreover, the short session allots only 30 days for legislators to convene on the floor of the house or senate to introduce bills.

Most bills passed during this session won’t require funds, according to state reps. Kevin Jackson, R-Bowling Green, and Robert Duvall, R-Bowling Green; the latter added, “We try everything we can to not open up the budget during a short session.”

Instead, these short sessions are primarily intended to clean up and help keep track of existing bills, the two legislators said.

“But,” Jackson added, “as human nature is, we all would like to get a few things done and changed and added and so forth, and then, that’s what you run into — everybody wants to file a bunch of bills.”

The two and State Sen. David Givens, R-Greensburg, shared several of their top priorities.

Income tax reduction

Lowering the state income tax from 4% to 3.5% is a priority, Givens said — and there are enough votes to pass it, he added.

The General Assembly will take that vote in the first or second week of session, Givens said; its passage would make it effective January 2026, he added.

Lowering the rate in recent years has allowed Kentuckians to pocket more of what they earn. On the other hand, it means less money goes to the General Fund, Kentucky’s primary revenue pool, which provides billions in funding for departments, programs and services statewide.

In 2022, the General Assembly passed House Bill 8, which allowed it to begin reducing the income tax rate by 0.5 percentage points per year — if Kentucky meets two financial criteria in the preceding fiscal year: First, the Budget Reserve Trust Fund, sometimes called Kentucky’s rainy day fund, must have been at least 10% of a given fiscal year’s General Fund revenues without tobacco dollars. Second, the General Fund’s revenues, without tobacco dollars, must have been at least equivalent to its appropriations even if a 1 percentage point reduction was applied to the income tax rate.

While Kentucky fell short of meeting the conditions in 2023, state news outlets widely reported in August that State Budget Director John Hicks affirmed Kentucky met the criteria.

“We’ve been able — through some very prudent, conservative budgeting and some wise investments over the years, along with growth in the local economy — to hit the trigger to go ahead and proceed on that next step in the income tax adjustment,” Givens said.

Prior authorization exemptions

Duvall is prioritizing a bill that would automatically exempt certain medical providers from needing to seek prior authorization from an insurance company to carry out procedures or services— intending to save medical providers time and reduce patients’ wait times, especially for important procedures.

The legislation would automatically exempt medical providers from seeking prior authorization for a given procedure if they had obtained a prior authorization approval rate of around 90%-93% for that same procedure the prior year, Duvall said. Pharmaceuticals would be excluded from these exemptions, meaning that medications would be excluded, he added.

The annual number of automatic exemptions would be capped at 110% of the number of claims submitted for a particular procedure by a provider the previous year, he said. It’d mainly be for surgical procedures, nearly all of which require prior authorization, he added.

While insurance companies widely require medical providers to obtain prior authorization for certain provisions and services to save on costs, physicians and organizations such as the American Medical Association have widely condemned the existing practice as an obstruction to getting patients timely, needed care.

“If I had to sum it up in sort of a real simple scenario, if a doctor is getting approved at a rate of 93%, why in the world would you, as the insurance company, want to waste your time and waste the doctor’s time to go through prior authorization all the time?” he said.

“(Insurance companies) are paying for (procedures). They want to make sure that everything is being done correctly. Makes sense,” Duvall said. “But at least for (these) procedures, that would be a streamlined process so that (prior authorization) wouldn’t slow the process down for the doctors and for the patients, because a lot of physicians’ offices, they spend a lot of time and it costs a lot of money for doctors — wasted time and dollars that could be spent on really improving health care … So, we’re just trying to strike a good balance between the two sides.”