Even late in his term, Gov. Steve Sisolak’s tenure was defined by his COVID response — a response he argued saved lives, even if it caused collateral economic damage. 

The former acting chief of the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) says he blames the governor’s office for actions that slowed down Nevada’s response to a torrent of unemployment claims during the pandemic.

Efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in 2017 created immense volatility in the insurance marketplaces across the country. But Heather Korbulic, outgoing director of the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, says that turbulent period also created an opportunity to dive into the federal health care law and explore what works.

With implementation of Nevada’s second-in-the-nation public health insurance option still years away, Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) is considering a list of shorter-term solutions to reduce the number of uninsured people in the state.

When lawmakers kicked off their 120-day legislative session in February, the state was still recovering from a brutal winter surge of COVID-19, which saw a thousand new cases of the virus reported across the state each day.

Nevada became the second state in the nation to enact a state-managed public health insurance option on Wednesday, with Gov. Steve Sisolak’s signature transforming a bill that hadn’t even been made public until six weeks ago into law.

It was the first time Korbulic — who left DETR in June — has spoken publicly about the personal toll of the threats she received.

Sponsored by the governor’s office and presented by Sisolak’s policy director, Heather Korbulic, AB450 stops short of implementing any immediate changes. Instead, it would create an interim committee that would study workforce development programs at the state’s community colleges, as well as the role a change in governance structure could have in the way such programs — and the colleges themselves — are funded.

Becerra made the announcement Tuesday while visiting a health care center in Carson City. He followed it up with a roundtable that featured Gov. Steve Sisolak and Heather Korbulic, a staffer for the governor who previously directed the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange.

But for Steve Feeder, a 60-year-old Clark County resident, his comments on Sisolak’s Facebook page this spring calling the governor a “tyrant” and stating that “like Hong Kong protesters we need to arm ourselves and form a militia and fight back” have resulted in real-world consequences — criminal misdemeanor charges.

As open enrollment kicked off on Nevada’s health insurance exchange earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the law on which the exchange was built, the Affordable Care Act.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act next week, Nevada’s health insurance exchange isn’t anticipating any impact on next year’s policies.

Gov. Steve Sisolak has appointed former lawmaker and legal aid center leader Barbara Buckley to lead a “strike force” focused on improving the processing of Nevada’s backlogged unemployment claims.

There’s a gap of about 46,293 people who filed weekly claims that have not been paid. But Schmidt said Nevadans should not expect all of the claims to be paid; he said the number of applications filed appears to be outpacing the estimates of how many self-employed people there are in Nevada, which is thought to be anywhere from 85,000 to 200,000 people.

The petition argues that the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation is misinterpreting Department of Labor guidance from April on who should be eligible for the PUA program and unnecessarily delaying payment for people desperate for money. It comes after DETR officials said many claimants are ineligible for PUA because they are eligible for standard benefits.

Gov. Steve Sisolak said that Heather Korbulic had requested the transfer out of concern for her personal safety. She’ll move back to her previous role as executive director of the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, and an interim director will be determined within the next week, Sisolak said.

Of the total PUA applications, about 106,000 people are thought to be eligible. That means about 27,000 people who are eligible have yet to receive those benefits.

A report produced by the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation and provided to members of the Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee on Tuesday puts numbers on the bottleneck: there are 35 contract workers serving as adjudicators for the PUA program, and they had 1,685 eligibility issues to resolve as of last week. But there are more than 40,000 pending PUA issues to resolve that can only be addressed by a qualified DETR employee — and only eight such employees are working on that backlog.

Heather Korbulic, director of the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR), said in a video press briefing that 116,996 PUA claims had been filed as of Friday morning. About 40 percent of claims being filed are deemed ineligible for the program for reasons including that people are eligible for regular state unemployment insurance instead of the new federally funded program.

Director Heather Korbulic announced that 26,876 PUA claimants had been paid as of Friday morning, or 27 percent of all claims filed. While not all claims will be deemed eligible and paid, the latest number is up from 18,445 on Wednesday.