Republican Washington state Rep. Matt Marshall, a U.S. Army veteran, spoke to community members on Thursday, March 20, at Yelm’s town hall event and provided an update on what he’s been up to since taking office — which includes finding solutions to veteran depression and suicide, one of his top priorities in office.
During the town hall, Marshall said he’s been trying to work with Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) and soldiers transitioning to leave active duty to ensure they have somewhere to land after leaving the military.
“I’m actually working with what’s considered the Veterans Caucus, which is not an official caucus inside the House, but it’s both the House and Senate, representatives and senators,” Marshall said. “We get together once a month, and we brainstorm ideas on how we can better address veterans issues. One of the ones that’s near my heart is veterans suicide and veterans mental health. This is something where there’s a lot of work to do. Working with the local VFW, we see the impacts. Anybody who served knows somebody who struggled and knows that you’ve been that phone call in that time of need.”
Marshall said there are multiple people he knows who are having trouble interfacing and need access to mental health care through American Lake. He said he’s working hard to try to champion a way to enhance the availability in mental health care across the board, but his driving motivation is veteran health care and veteran suicide.
“I plan to be drafting quite a few bills here in the interim now that I’m starting to get my legs under me and understand how the process works. I will have quite a bit of legislation in the mental health realm coming out into this next session,” Marshall said.
Marshall is also a prime sponsor on a bill to align Washington with other states on how medical assistants are certified in medical practices. Marshall said, currently, physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners are spending more time in administrative tasks than they are providing direct patient care.
“What that means to all of us is longer wait times, and the providers can’t have as large of a patient population so they’re not accepting new patients. If you call in for a medication, a refill, the medical assistant takes that phone call and tells you they’ll talk with their provider and then they might sit for an entire day or a week or get forgotten about,” Marshall said. “So what this is allowing is withstanding orders and physicians can delegate some of these administrative tasks to include prescription refills to their medical assistants on written standing orders. When you call and you talk to the medical assistant, if it’s not a controlled substance, it’s just a standard prescription, they’ll be able to refill it for you right then and there with the physician cosigning it within 72 hours.”
Marshall added this would cost the state nothing, and it’s not something where the state would be “expanding the scope,” but rather aligning nationally with practices.
Marshall is also a co-sponsor on House Bill 1106, which recognizes “the tremendous sacrifices made by our military veterans by phasing down the disability rating requirements to ensure more disabled veterans are eligible for property tax relief.”
“More disabled vets (could) have access to property tax decreases or potentially no property tax,” Marshall said. “I would like to see that all of our property taxes come down, myself included, but this was something that we were able to actually move forward in the House and so I’m proud to be a co-sponsor on that one.”
Marshall, an assistant ranking member on the state of Washington’s Healthcare Committee, can be contacted at 360-786-7912. View the bills Marshall is working on at www.legiscan.com/WA/people/Matt-Marshall/id/26294.
Marshall was elected to represent Legislative District 2 after defeating fellow Republican John Snaza in the 2024 general election.
