Registration - Our New First Target
The leadership of the Alliance has made a necessary initial change in the focus of our effort, from going for a mandatory License to a going for a Voluntary Credential, what Minnesota calls a state Registration. This page discusses why this change is unfortunately necessary. For more information on the difference between a state License and a state Registration, visit our Registration vs. License page.
Quick Recap of the 2009 Legislative Session and What We Learned
Mistake #1. Getting in so late.
The 2009 legislative session ran from 06Jan-18May. Our bill was introduced in both the MN House and Senate in early March. This was well behind the scheduled time line we had set out for ourselves. We waited trying to get feedback from as many of the other professions named in the exemptions clause as we could. Unfortunately we waited too long and didn't get the bill officially into the process until late in the session when most of the hearings that we could have and should have been involved in were over. And by the half-way point of the session when we finally did get in, the legislators were too concerned about getting in their hearings about the budget debacle, and since the budget ended up being much worse than they imagined, that one single issue sucked all the oxygen out of just about everything else that wasn't already most of the way through. Lesson - Get the bill officially in the process as early as possible.
Mistake #2 - We had a gigantic bill.
This was bad particularly in the context of this session where legislators were worried about the budget, handing them a 24 page bill and asking them to sign on as a co-author was like asking them to hold onto a vial of toxic waste. Many of them wanted no part of a 24 page bill, because more pages meant more issues more people would have with more parts of the bill. Some bills we saw were less than a page, and were tweaking little parts of already existing bills. A new credentialing law is certainly going to require more than that, but we saw these smaller bills getting in and out of hearings with little if any trouble. Our 24 pages behemoth however not got its first committee hearing. Lesson: Our bill needs to be slimmed way down and when passed is not set in stone, but can be tweaked later down the road.
Mistake #3 - Fundamental misunderstandings.
We went into the session with a fundamental misunderstanding. We thought taking a bill to the Capitol that had all the elements of a good License would be seen as a benefit to the Legislators. We thought passing the bill that would take our profession from essentially zero state-level regulations to full Licensure in one simple bill that would get things set in stone once and for all and the legislators could see our process as being done and having us our of their hair would be a good thing. When the session started however, we found quite the opposite to be true.
This particular group of legislators who oversee professional regulations like to see professions who want to be credentialed start at the bottom of the regulatory mountain and take small steps to move toward the pinnacle, full Licensure status. And what we saw in hearings confirmed this. We saw Respiratory Therapists (who have been state Registered since 1992 and who have made several tweaks to their law over the years) come in with yet another simple tweaking bill and passing their bill with little opposition making the final tweak to change the wording in their law to reflect full Licensure status. Lesson: Don't try to go from the bottom of the mountain to the top in one big step. Start small and keep taking steps to get to the top and it will happen with much less angst and opposition.
In our case, that first step is to go for a Registration bill.
- It will be voluntary. Only those who use the title "Registered Massage Therapist" are required to have the state credential. If a person chooses not to be registered, they can still practice massage, they just cannot use the "protected title".
- Once the bill passes and is enacted we will be doing some PR to get the word out to the public that there is now a state credential they can look for, so potential clients will know the choice they have.
- For those who qualify for (through education or experience) and choose to get the state credential, they will be exempted from City-level massage licensing laws. So for anyone who gets registered, they will not have to also hold a city License, whether the city leaves their city ordinance on the books or not. For those practitioners who choose not to register, they will continue to be able to practice under the current city licensing laws.
- The same goes for the practicing under the MN CAP law or CAM law. Those who become state Registered will no longer be practicing under the jurisdiction of the CAP Law, while those who practice without Registering will still be under that law's jurisdiction, just as they are now. Clink the link for more info on the MN CAP Law.
- Registration will be cheaper to fund than a License which means a Registration fee will be less expensive fee than a Licensure fee would have been.
- Registration will also give us a better idea of how many practitioners there are in MN, so that when we go for full Licensure down the road, we will have a better estimate of practitioner numbers which will make the Licensure fees lower than we were looking at with the bill in this past session.
- Credentialing fees are determined by an office in the state, based mostly on the number of practitioners to be credentialed. Since we have no idea exactly how many Massage Therapists there are, the number we gave them to determine that cost was only a guess based on the memberships of the two largest professional associations representing Massage Therapists, ABMP and AMTA. So by having a voluntary credential as a starting place, we will get a better idea and be able to eventually have lower fees if we go for a License in the future.
If you have any questions about what Registration would mean for your practice, send us an email.
Page Updated: 22Dec2009
