Kathy Rapp

Pennsylvania Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-65) has chaired the House Health Committee since 2019.

However, the Democrats took a slim majority in the House for the first time in 12 years following the November elections.

With a Democrat recently named Speaker of the House, Rapp will have to wait and see how committee appointments go.

Rapp, who has been in the House since 2005, knows that a change in the majority party means major changes in the work.

“I have served in the minority before,” she said Thursday. “There’s a huge change. You have to realize that the other party has a different philosophical view.”

Rapp has been the majority chair of the House health committee since 2019.

Typically, with a Democratic Speaker, Rapp would be relegated, at best, to minority chair.

Rep. Mark Rozzi (D-126) has said he will be an “independent” Speaker.

“When you have the majority, the majority usually chairs the committee,” Rapp said. “Having a supposedly independent Speaker, I don’t even know if I’m going to be health committee chair. I don’t know how that will work out.”

For the past several years, Rapp and Rep. Dan Frankel (D-23), have been the respective majority and minority chairs of the health committee. If their roles are reversed, Rapp said she hopes their working relationship will continue.

“Rep. Frankel and I worked as best we could,” Rapp said. “Many times during the committee, we weren’t afraid to take on controversial issues.”

“I tried to be fair and gracious,” she said. “I don’t expect Rep. Frankel to be any different.”

The majority chair has the power to make significant decisions regarding legislation that comes to the committee.

The Speaker steers legislation to the appropriate committees.

When the majority chair receives proposed legislation, he or she looks it over.

Rapp looked over those proposals with her team. “You have to surround yourself with good people,” she said.

“I have a very good executive director,” she said. “My first executive director was an attorney. Very well versed in health law. My current executive director worked for the Health Department under the Corbett Administration. He’s also an attorney and worked for the Pennsylvania Medical Association.”

She also pointed to her legislative assistant and office administrator. “I have good staff who are very knowledgeable.”

“Any bill that came across my desk, we went over the ins and outs,” she said. “We analyzed bills to make sure it was a good bill for everybody involved.”

“The majority chair ultimately has the say if a bill will run,” Rapp said. “The last couple years… I’ve looked at bills and I’ve run them past the Republican members.”

“The members decide what bills we’re going to run and hopefully pass,” she said. “If the members say, ‘We can’t support that bill,’ you end up not running that bill.”

She said it doesn’t make sense to run bills to the full membership knowing there isn’t support.

And, she doesn’t favor more legislation in general.

“I’m not one that thinks we should have more and more laws in Pennsylvania,” she said. “We are overburdening people with laws.”

When a bill has support, “we notify the minority chair on what we plan on running,” Rapp said.

When a committee has hearings, the majority chair has more power. “The majority chair conducts the meeting… runs the meeting,” she said.

Rapp looked for fairness in those hearings.

“When I was the majority chair I would always call the minority chair,” she said. “I always allowed the same number of testifiers.”

With a Democratic governor and an ostensible Democratic majority in the House, Rapp has already seen a sea change in the types of legislation that is moving.

Recently, “we’re seeing a lot of very liberal bills coming across our emails,” Rapp said. “Repealing the Abortion Control Act, restricting your ability to own a firearm, expanding injection sites in the cities.

The typical, what I would call, Democrat bills.”

They are not the types of bills that Rapp would have moved forward from a position as majority chair.

“It is the majority chair who looks at the list of bills,” she said.

When her own look and her team’s were not enough, there was plenty of other help available.

“We have lobbyists that come to our door,” she said. “Everybody involved with health would weigh in. They weigh in and we reach out to them. Insurance weighs in a lot with regard to health bills. It’s very difficult to get all of those people on the same page.”

But, most who weigh in only reflect one side of an issue. Even the legislators who propose the bills have their own agendas. Those might conflict with the issues important to a representative in a rural district. Sometimes, getting out into the district is the best answer.

“If it’s a bill that would affect hospitals, I’m going to go and visit hospitals within my district and say, ‘How is this going to affect… Warren General?'” she said. “I’m not going to run a bill that’s going to cause harm to the people that I represent. In a lot of ways, that’s how I would make my decisions.”

“Ultimately, that’s up to our due diligence on the bill,” Rapp said.

Rapp may not be in a position to have the final say on health committee bills this session.

“I just have to wait and see if I’m appointed health committee chair,” she said. “Time will tell.