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NYSCA Lobbying Center

Scope Modernization Bill - A4706 (Clark) | S#### (Goundares)
The Title VIII Coalition Partnership Bill - A2588 (Peoples-Stokes) | S3350 (Scarcella-Spanton)
Retrospective Audit Look Back Bill - A3365 (Lavine) | S5209 (Scarcella-Spanton)
Credit Card Bill - A3986 (Bores) | S2105 (Cooney)

2025 Legislative Update

New York’s 2025 legislative session began on January 8, 2025 when both houses convened for their first day of session. Normally, this day would also be marked with the Governor’s State of the State address, but Governor Kathy Hochul gave that address one week later, where she outlined her legislative priorities for the upcoming session.

On January 21, the Governor unveiled her proposed 2025-2026 Fiscal Year budget. The Governor proposed a $252 billion state budget, which is a $10 billion (3.6%) increase over the prior year’s budget. The proposed spending plan does not include any income tax increases and includes several initiatives to get money back into the pockets of New Yorkers, including the already announced inflation refund plan, free school meals for all students, and an enhanced child tax credit, as well as a middle-class tax cut and free community college. This increased spending will be covered by an 8% increase in revenue that the State has seen. This proposed budget will also protect the $21.1 billion in the rainy-day fund to help New York prepare for future budget challenges.

The start of a new legislative session also means that all of our priority bills needed to be reintroduced in each house. We have been working on doing this, and at this point, we are just waiting on a few more bill numbers. We are pleased to report though that our scope of practice bill has been reintroduced in the New York State Assembly with our new Assembly sponsor Assemblymember Sarah Clark. Assemblymember Clark is from the Rochester area and is a member of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. She is well versed on scope of practice issues and is excited to take over as sponsor from Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell, who retired at the end of last year. She will be working with our Senate sponsor, Senator Andrew Gounardes on the legislation. At this time, we don’t yet have a Senate bill number, but the Senator is in the process of getting the bill reintroduced.

In addition to finding a new Assembly sponsor and getting the bill reintroduced, we have continued to do outreach to other stakeholder groups that had expressed issues with the current draft of our scope of practice bill. As you may recall, after numerous meetings and conversations with New York Physical Therapy Association (NYPTA), they have taken a neutral position on our bill. This is a very positive development. We look forward to continuing to work with NYPTA and are pleased that our current bill draft doesn’t raise any concerns for them. In fact, we recently did a joint letter with NYPTA asking the State to consider the roll of conservative care providers in the New York State Prevention Agenda.

We have also had introductory conversations with the the New York Society of Orthopaedic Surgeons (NYSOS). Our conversations with NYSOS are ongoing and have not reached any conclusion yet, but the fact that we are communicating and opening a dialogue is an important development.

While scope continues to be the legislative priority, we have several other bills that we are working on getting reintroduced as well including the bill that would limit the time period for lookback audits by insurance companies, the bill that would allow healthcare providers to form business partnerships with each other and medical doctors, and a final one that would require disclosure and limitations on fees for payments by credit card or electronically by insurers to providers.

In addition to working on getting our priority legislation the legislation reintroduced, we are also reviewing and monitoring the budget process. There are several proposals related to Workers Compensation that we are analyzing and deciding whether they will impact the profession or our patients. These proposals include allowing medical and surgical residents and fellows in academic training to treat workers’ compensation patients, automatically enrolling all eligible healthcare providers in the Workers’ Compensation system, requiring payers to pay workers’ compensation medical bills without accepting liability, and require health insurers and health benefits plans to pay for treatment when workers' compensation treatment is being contested or denied. The Senate and Assembly are in the process of reviewing the Governor’s proposed budget and will release their own one-house plans in mid-March. From there, the Governor and Legislature will negotiate with the goal of having a final budget in place by the budget deadline of April 1. After the budget process is completed, we will turn to non-budget issues through the end of the legislative session, which is scheduled to conclude on June 12.

The next State Board of Chiropractic meeting will take place on Thursday, February 27, and we will be there to represent NYSCA. We also continue to meet with and talk with the Workers Compensation Board as needed. We are pleased to report that representatives from the Workers’ Compensation Board will be speaking to the membership at the Fall meeting in Syracuse. Stay tuned for more details.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to any member of the Legislative Committee or NYSCA leadership.