Report: How Texas Medicaid Policymaking Shapes Latino Health and Economic Mobility

The Latino Texas Policy Center has released a new report entitled, From Coverage to Opportunity: How Texas Medicaid Policymaking Shapes Latino Health and Economic Mobility.

You can download the full report here.

The Executive Summary of the report is below:

During the 2025, 89th Texas Legislative Session, lawmakers considered a broad range of Medicaid-related health care bills with direct implications for insurance coverage, maternal health, behavioral health, provider participation, and rural health access. Using the Latino Texas Policy Center’s Human Capital Investment/Bienestar (HCI/B) framework that evaluates Access, Quality, Equity, and Sustainability, this policy brief assesses the combined impact of 14 bills signed into law and 14 bills that were not approved.

The analysis finds that enacted legislation produced modest but meaningful targeted investments in selected areas of Medicaid policy and programming, particularly maternal and infant health, behavioral health, provider participation, nutrition supports, rural access, and consumer outreach. However, these approved measures largely focused on incremental, selective system improvements rather than expanding coverage.

At the same time, the strongest potential Latino HCI/B investments—including broad Medicaid eligibility expansion, Affordable Care Act (ACA)-aligned reforms, and postpartum coverage continuity proposals— failed to advance. This Session continued the pattern of leaving major opportunities to reduce Latino health disparities and inequities unrealized in favor of safer, institutional responses - adding to the political-policy failures to address the states uninsured problem of over 5 million Texans of which 61% are Latinos.

Taken together, the legislative outcomes suggest Texas continues to prioritize selective administrative and programmatic improvements over transformative health investments capable of substantially reducing Latino uninsured rates, increasing preventive care access, and strengthening long-term family economic mobility.