Jason Monks
Bill Sponsorship: Sponsor
Bill Support Status: Supporter
House Bill 515 Vote Status: Voted Yes
Title: Assistant Majority Leader
District: 22
Chamber: House
Party: Republican
Phone: 208-332-1036
Email: [email protected]
Address: 3865 S. Black Cat Road, Nampa, ID 83687
In the News:
House Assistant Majority Leader Jason Monks, R-Nampa, who will be the lead House sponsor of the bill, said, “I think it’s the right thing to do. I think we have painstakingly worked with as many of the stakeholders as possible on this issue to come up with a reasonable solution to what arguably is a terrible injustice going on right now.”
Monks said he’s hoping to get the bill finalized and introduced next week
“I wouldn’t carry a bill that I didn’t think we didn’t need to fix,” he said. “This is a situation where I think we needed some adjustments in what’s there with the law, and I think what we’ve got is a great product that’s going to be better for the people of Idaho. We’re going to provide more transparency for them and a little bit more protection for them on the backend of it.”
“I think what we have come up with is a reasonable solution to some of the problems that are plaguing people in Idaho,” said Monks, the lawmaker planning to introduce the legislation on the House side.
Local News 8 and Daily Inter Lake
Representative Jason Monks says, “I think what we’ve got is a great product. It’s going to be better for the people of Idaho. It’ll provide some more transparency for them, and it will provide some more protection for them on the back end of it.”
KPVI and Idaho County Free Press
Monks said most medical debt cases are resolved amicably and this bill wouldn’t affect them. If there is a full hearing on the bill, he said he would bring data showing the number of people affected by medical debt, and he could bring hundreds of people with stories about how they suffered negative effects such as having their credit ruined, often by small bills they didn’t know about.
“There are plenty of examples of where people have unknowingly been subjected to predatory practices on the collections side of it … for very small bills,” Monks said.
“It was the right thing to do. Our citizens out there deserve more transparency in the health care system . . . and through no fault of their own often had been taken advantage of (by) a legal process.”
Republican Rep. Jason Monks, the Legislature’s assistant majority leader and Zollinger’s friend, argued in favor of the bill. He said nobody was breaking the law with medical debt collection, that in some instances led to large bills that included attorney fees dwarfing the original medical costs.
“The current law allows for the situations that we’re dealing with right now,” he told the committee. “I think the current law in my opinion is unjust and unfair. I think the law takes advantage of individuals and that’s why we need to change this.”
“I think the current law in my opinion is unjust and unfair,” Monks said. “It takes advantage of individuals. And that’s why we need to change this.”
“You can end up in collections for a lot of different reasons, knowingly or not,” said House Assistant Majority Leader Jason Monks, R-Nampa, the bill’s lead sponsor. “Remember, the patient doesn’t have a choice in this — they’re the one being sued … but they can’t control the costs.”
“We regulate when we see abuses,” Rep. Jason Monks, R-Nampa, said in his closing statements Monday. “We regulate when we see things are unfair. And we regulate when we see things are unjust. In my opinion, there have been some unjust and unfair situations in this state, and this is an attempt to bring that back to some evenness and fairness.”