SB89

The amendment completely gutted the bill's original mandate requiring counties and municipalities to provide minimum emergency medical services and establish state regulatory standards, replacing it with a narrower task force that will only study EMS funding mechanisms and report recommendations by November 1, 2026. The revised version also adds a requirement for the task force to review the Rural Health Transformation program's expenditures, but removes any binding obligation for EMS service provision.

The amendment makes minor technical edits to clarify the task force's funding examination language, changing "funding mechanisms to support" to "fund" and "in" to "for," along with a bill codification number update from 26.404.13 to 26.404.14. These are largely stylistic changes that do not substantively alter the bill's purpose of studying emergency medical services funding.

The House Health and Human Services Committee added a new requirement for the task force to examine ambulance service payment policies and reimbursement standards for out-of-network emergency medical services, which BROADENS the bill's scope to specifically address payment mechanisms beyond general funding mechanisms for counties and municipalities.

This amendment converted the bill from an engrossed House version to the enrolled final version by removing legislative markup language (underscores and strikethrough indicators) and adding official enrollment certificates and signature blocks required for a bill to become law. The substantive content of the task force provisions remained unchanged; this is purely a formatting and procedural update reflecting the bill's progression through the legislative process.