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 proposed budget includes a number of provisions that would impact New York’s nurses. One of the proposals included is the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC). The NLC proposal allows nurses from other Compact-Member states to practice nursing in New York. We support the NLC and are currently working with others on educating the Legislature on the importance of the NLC and seeking to have New York become the 42nd state to join the compact.
Another proposal included in the Governor’s proposed budget would permit general hospitals to provide care in patient homes. This is intended to build upon the “Acute Hospital Care At Home” demonstration program developed by CMS during the height of the pandemic. The proposal would authorize general hospitals to provide care in patient’s homes without obtaining a license as a home care agency. We are monitoring this proposal to ensure that nurses are properly incorporated into the model that is being contemplated.
We are also monitoring a budget proposal that would establish the Emergency Medical Community Assessment Program (EMCAP), which would develop standardized scoring metrics which will be used to evaluate the performance of EMS agencies across the State. Counties would then be required to incorporate EMCAP findings within their own EMS plans to address identified coverage gaps. Further, this proposal would authorize EMS demonstration programs to “promote innovation in the delivery of EMS services, and test novel delivery methods developed by agencies and practitioners.” We will be sure to closely track this proposal so that nurses are appropriately utilized.
The Governor’s budget also includes a proposal regarding abortion protections. The proposal would require that hospitals provide abortion care to patients in emergency situations when necessary to stabilize the patient, and the patient consents to such services. Additionally, this bill would allow prescribing practitioners to request that their name be replaced with the prescribing health care facility’s name or address on a prescription label for abortion medications, such as mifepristone and misoprostol. This latter proposal is also contained in S36-A/A2145-A (Senator Mayer, Assemblymember Reyes). This bill has already passed the Senate and is likely to pass in the Assembly in the coming weeks.
Now that the Governor has released her 2025 – 2026 proposed budget, the Senate Finance Committee and the Assembly Ways and Means Committee will hold joint budget hearing schedules, where they will hear from interested parties about what was in, and in some cases, what was not in the Governor’s proposed budget. The hearings will last until the end of February, and in mid-March, both houses will release their proposed one-house budget bills, which will accept or reject the Governor’s proposals as well include the priorities for each house. Once all three budgets have been released, negotiations between the Governor, Senate and Assembly will commence with the hope of having a final budget deal in place by the State Constitutionally mandated deadline of April 1.
We are also focusing on non-budgetary legislative issues. One bill that we are working on would require hospitals to add a seat to their governing board for a registered professional nurse who is clinically active. This bill, S2278 (Senator Webb) will soon be reintroduced in the Assembly by Assemblymember Reyes. We are working on gaining additional co-sponsors for this legislation and building a coalition of support. For more information regarding ANA-NY’s legislative priorities, please see the legislative priorities page on the ANA-NY website, which may be found here.
Once the budget is complete, we will exclusively focus on non-budget issues until the conclusion of the legislative session on June 12, 2025. We will continue to work with the Legislative Committee and the Board to weigh in on issues impacting the profession throughout the course of this legislative session. ANA-NY’s lobby day will be taking place on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, when members of the Board and the Legislative Committee will come to Albany to advocate for ANA-NY’s legislative priorities. For those members who won’t be in Albany in person for lobby day, we will be using our Voter Voice platform that will enable you to contact your elected officials with ANA-NY’s lobby day priorities. Stay tuned for messages from Voter Voice and follow the instructions to participate in the process.
Finally, we would like to remind you that ANA-NY has a Political Action Committee (PAC). The ANA-NY PAC will be supporting candidates that support the profession and issues of importance to our members. We urge you to visit the ANA-NY PAC web site and donate.
If you have any questions about the legislative process or the priorities of ANA-NY, please contact a member of the Legislative Committee. As always, we welcome your questions, thoughts, ideas or comments on legislation or the bill track.
