Your Success, the Legislature’s Failure, and June Deadline to Support Health Coverage
The Texas legislative session ended on Monday, and our first order of business is to say thank you for everything that you and other health care supporters accomplished.
Thanks to your relentless advocacy efforts, we can report these hard-won health coverage successes from the legislative session:
Through a last-minute amendment, the Legislature passed a version of HB 290 to help eligible kids keep their Medicaid health insurance and keep getting the health care they need.
The Legislature passed HB 133, ensuring moms have six months of health coverage — rather than the current two months — after their pregnancy.
For the first time ever, the majority of the Texas House signed on to legislation to accept Medicaid expansion funding and expand health coverage.
Unfortunately, as you know, this is only part of the story.
This session, state leaders absolutely failed to expand health coverage to 1.4 million uninsured Texans who would qualify if the state accepted Medicaid expansion funding.
They even refused to hold a hearing on the bills. When legislators tried to force the issue by introducing amendments to other bills, members of both the House and the Senate voted them down. The failure by state leaders is unacceptable — as several Cover Texas Now members emphasized earlier this week — but we’re committed to keeping up the fight.
In fact, our next opportunity to push for Medicaid expansion is already here.
Texas leaders are gathering public input this month on one of the state’s applications to the federal government for health funding (through a “Medicaid 1115 Waiver”). We support the state’s request for mental health funding and continued funding to reimburse hospitals for emergency care provided to uninsured Texans. But we also want the state to update the funding request so it expands health coverage, allowing currently uninsured Texans to get healthy and avoid those trips to the hospital. The state held its first public hearing on the funding request on Wednesday in Dallas. We were thrilled to see that the majority of Texans at this week’s hearing called for state leaders to expand health coverage as part of the state’s Medicaid funding request.
Now you can raise your voice too by submitting written comments to the state before the June 28th deadline:
Want to do more? You can also testify June 10th at the state’s virtual hearing or June 15th in Austin at the state’s in-person and virtual hearing.
Thank you for speaking out this month for health coverage and for everything you did to help us make progress during the legislative session!