A 2016 General Assembly Session Review
The 2016 General Assembly has come and gone and, after 59 long days and nights (they adjourned a day early), this session will no doubt go down as one of the more productive in recent memory for the VDA membership. The General Assembly adjourned after considering over 3,000 bills and resolutions and passing a two-year budget that totaled more than $100 billion. Economic development, workforce training, and health care topics of various shapes & sizes took top billing in terms of time and attention from Virginia’s 140 member legislature.
The VDA membership battled the insurance companies, worked tirelessly with the Virginia Dental Hygienists Association on judiciously expanding the remote supervision statute, secured $200,000 for the MOM project in the state budget and beat back a couple of attempts by the Department of Health Professions (DHP) to significantly alter the governance of the Board of Dentistry (BoD) without any input from VDA members.
The bills that our membership requested as outlined below (HB310, SB712 & HB16) passed without a single ‘NO’ vote in either the House or Senate. This speaks to the hard work the VDA members were able to do prior to session in terms of educating legislators as these were not simple bills. The unanimous votes speak, also, to the diligence relative to how and what to ask for in terms of policy changes.
