The state’s chiropractors want to make a slight adjustment. Not to the neck or back, but to Ohio’s public records laws.
In both 2019 and 2020, state lawmakers narrowed the ability of chiropractors and other health care providers to solicit car crash victims. The new rules required public offices to redact the phone numbers of crash victims in response to public records requests. And providers were required to wait at least 30 days before contacting these would-be patients, and even then only via the U.S. Postal Service. Lawmakers relented in other bills passed months later, allowing chiropractors to call or send one email, text and mailer to crash victims but not approach them directly.
Several chiropractors filed soon lawsuits challenging the new rules. The Ohio Supreme Court earlier this month agreed to take up an appellate ruling that found the original 2019 law – passed within a 2,600-page state budget bill – violated a rule in the state constitution that limits legislation to a single subject. And the fact that lawmakers amended that policy months later with a standalone bill didn’t fix the foundational problem, the judges wrote.
The Ohio Constitution states that “no bill shall contain more than one subject.” It’s designed to prevent logrolling, where lawmakers pass bills by cramming in unrelated ideas to win votes. But the rule is, at best, unevenly enforced. In recent years alone, statewide K-12 COVID-19 vaccination rules were created in a bill about schooling for military children, and nursing home and Medicaid policies were reworked in a bill originally about which pharmacy workers can administer vaccines.
That’s why state attorneys told the Supreme Court the case presents significant implications for lawmaking in Ohio. The lower court’s ruling, they said, creates a “powerful tool” for judges to thwart state laws. They’re asking the Supreme Court to rule that a violation of the single subject rule is “cured” when lawmakers revisit the same law in later, standalone legislation.
The chiropractors – Allied Health & Chiropractic, First Choice Chiropractic, Prestige Chiropractic & Injury, among others – say that do-nothing amendments shouldn’t be allowed to spice up and “cure” fundamentally unconstitutional legislation. They asked the Supreme Court to refrain from taking the case and let the lower court’s opinion stand.
A unanimous panel of judges from the Cuyahoga-based Eighth Appellate District noted in an opinion that a standalone bill limiting chiropractors’ solicitations died in the Senate at the time. Thus, there’s a strong suggestion that the concept was inserted into the state budget for “tactical reasons,” which is the “very evil the one-subject rule was designed to prevent.” Stuffing what was a politically infeasible bill on its own into a comprehensive budget bill “skirted the formal testimonial process that prevented” the standalone bill from passing, according to the court’s ruling.
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