Disabilities: wheelchair repair under Medicaid
What they say
His campaign says he wrote and passed a right-to-repair bill for wheelchairs and mobility devices under Medicaid.
“Josh wrote and passed a "right to repair" bill that makes it far easier for people to repair wheelchairs and mobility devices covered under Medicaid.”
What the record shows ·
He is the sole sponsor of H.F. 2194 (2024), which would have barred the Medicaid program from requiring a prescription or prior authorization to reimburse a provider for repairing complex rehabilitation technology already prescribed and paid for under Medicaid; a House subcommittee recommended passage 3-0 on February 1, 2024, and the bill received no further action and did not become law. A bill with the same title that he did not sponsor, H.F. 2706, barring a prescription or a face-to-face visit rather than prior authorization, was introduced by the House Ways and Means Committee as successor to House Study Bill 744, was floor-managed by Rep. Best of Carroll, and passed the House 91-0 on April 19, 2024, the final day of the session, with Turek among the ayes; the Senate referred it to committee that day and took no further action, so it also did not become law. He filed his own bill again, word for word, as H.F. 425 (2025), which was referred to committee and went no further, and none of the 105 bills and resolutions the Legislature lists for him as sponsor or floor manager in the 90th and 91st General Assemblies was enacted on this subject. The report the campaign cites for the claim, an August 13, 2024 Iowa Capital Dispatch article, says the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services dropped the prescription and in-person visit requirements by a policy change beginning July 1, 2024, after the legislation did not advance, and quotes him: “ultimately we weren’t able to get it across the finish line legislatively, but because of the attention that we brought to it and the advocacy that we did, we’re able to get it done.”
Limit: He sponsored his own repair bill and voted for the committee version that passed the House 91-0. Neither became law; the repair change came through state Medicaid policy.