State Democrats tout more legislative priorities

CARSON CITY — Democratic leaders in the Nevada Legislature outlined bills Tuesday focusing on consumer protection, including help for homeowners in foreclosure.

Among the measures discussed during a roundtable with reporters were AB273 and AB300, which center on the good faith of the borrowers and lenders.

Assembly Floor Leader Marcus Conklin, D-Las Vegas, said AB273 seeks to protect homeowners on several fronts, including the overall take banks can walk away with when foreclosing.

Under current law, Conklin said, banks can foreclose on a house, sell it, then collect its insurance payment for the foreclosure.

With AB273, Conklin said banks would not be able to recoup money through all those venues. It would have to collect the difference between what the house was worth and what it sells for.

The measure also would prevent banks from getting a deficiency judgment and selling it to a third-party collection agency, a practice that doesn’t help homeowners because they end up owing the collection agency.

Using a $100,000 settlement as an example, Conklin said, a bank will get the settlement, sell it to a collection agency for say, $20,000, and the collection agency could then bill the homeowner $100,000, plus fees. In sum, the homeowner still is on the hook for $100,000 but the bank walked away at $20,000.

Conklin said the bill would offer a third layer of consumer protection by requiring that foreclosure settlements take into consideration both primary and secondary lenders.

Under current law, primary lenders are looped in, but secondary lenders are not, leaving borrowers vulnerable to additional collections.

AB300 also addresses foreclosures. Assemblyman Jason Frierson, D-Las Vegas, said the bill works within the framework of the state’s Foreclosure Mediation Program, which tries to avert disclosure. Frierson said the added protections of AB300 would bar banks from billing homeowners for their participation in the plan and would penalize lenders for making paperwork or bank representatives unavailable to borrowers.

Medical issues also will get attention. Sen. Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, discussed SB300, which would block hospitals from circumventing health insurers to get a bigger chunk of an accident settlement.

Leslie said hospitals have been waiting until an accident claim has been settled by third-party insurance so they can bill at a higher rate rather than bill the lower, agreed-upon fees it has with health insurers. SB300 would apply to hospitals with at least 150 beds.

Shirley Breeden, D-Henderson, discussed a to-be-introduced bill that would allow pharmacies to print the condition for which a drug has been prescribed on a prescription bottle or container.

Patients would be able to ask doctors to make the disclosure part of the prescription. Breeden and her peers said that would make it easier for children to care for aging parents and for emergency medical technicians to determine what a patient might have ingested.