Healthcare Investment Act.

SB 405 started as a chiropractic licensing and acupuncture certification bill. It passed the Senate as a chiropractic bill. Then the House gutted the entire thing and replaced it with emergency Medicaid funding provisions... increasing Medicaid appropriations from $600 million to $690 million recurring, plus $49.2 million for managed care.

This is a shell bill, but not the usual kind. Usually the legislature uses a shell to sneak something controversial past voters. Here, the House used a chiropractic shell to pass emergency healthcare funding. It passed 110-0. Every single member. In a legislature that can't agree on what day it is, 110 people voted yes on this.

The Senate killed it anyway. Not because they opposed it... but because the adjournment resolution said it wasn't on the pre-agreed list of eligible legislation. A procedural technicality during a $319 million Medicaid funding crisis. DHHS had already started cutting provider rates. Governor Stein urged the Senate to act. Speaker Hall accused the governor of manufacturing the crisis. Meanwhile the bill sat there, dead on arrival, 110-0 and going nowhere.

The title... "Healthcare Investment Act"... is spin on top of the shell. "Investment" is a generous word for a bill that included significant budget offsets and position cuts alongside the funding. But the bigger story is that 110 legislators agreed on something important, and the procedural machinery killed it.