ATLANTA — Sen. Renee Unterman supports legislation that isn’t universally popular with some of the newer lawmakers in her Republican Party.
Unterman attributes that to the differences in their experiences. She has been a nurse, a wife, a mayor, county commissioner, a member of the House of Representatives and a senator. As the chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and only female GOP senator, she could easily be labeled a passionate conservative.
When she hears discussion in the appropriations committee about increased funding for Meals on Wheels, she can recall the conversations she’s had over the years recounting the difference one hot meal delivered each day can mean to a shut-in who can no longer cook but isn’t eager to move from home in with a relative or nursing home. Such budget considerations are merely mathematical abstractions to the newer legislators.
A growing cadre of strident newcomers is determined to minimize both government spending and intrusion. Most of them are energetic, young men serving in their first public office.
Often, these men leave the legislature after a few terms for higher office, the attentions of their family or the demands of their career. Many GOP legislative seats have turned over three times, and a few four, since Unterman was first elected to the General Assembly from Buford in 1998.
As a result of the higher turnover rate, Unterman says legislators don’t become as familiar with government and how it touches people as lawmakers used to when they kept their seat for 15-20 years.
Just mastering the mechanics of the state budget — and what is federally funded — takes five years, she said.
“I’ve got all these young people that won’t vote with me,” Unterman said.
“They’ve got this mentality, ‘we’re not expanding government. We’re not giving more services.’ And I’m like, ‘you haven’t been there, done that,'” she says with a chuckle.
Indeed, the Senate easily passed a resolution urging Congress to adopt a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution and an amendment to the Georgia Constitution to prohibit raising the state income tax — both of which Unterman voted for but did not sponsor.
“It’s great if you have your whatever amount of money in the bank, but what if you don’t have any amount of money in the bank? What’s going to happen to those people?” she asks.
Some of the issues she has championed do expand government and increase spending. For example, she is pushing this year for legislation to require insurance companies to pay for medication commonly used in mouth cancer and similar conditions that can be taken orally. Now, the companies only pay for intravenous administration which requires a trip to a clinic and a nurse as opposed to gulping down a pill at home.
It would be a mandate, something most conservative Republicans have sworn to reject as a factor driving up premiums.
Unterman also supports funding added staff to process the licensing of adult daycare centers and hiring inspectors to police against violations.
A new effort is to support emergency beds for adult patients who suddenly become homeless when those inspectors — or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation — raid an unlicensed and unsanitary facility as they did in October.
“What do you do when you close down a facility? You’ve got to have emergency beds,” she said. “You think of an emergency room, but you never think of an emergency nursing-home bed.”
Her initiatives this year are the mostly the recommendations of an aging task force that was created last year, something the newcomers had no part in and no allegiance to.
“When I’m telling these guys what we’ve done for the past year, and they don’t want to vote,” she said. “We’ve got so many young guys. They just don’t see the bigger picture.”
Walter Jones is the Atlanta bureau chief for Morris News. Follow him on Twitter @MorrisNews and Facebook or contact him at walter.jones@morris.com and (404) 589-8424.
