The calendar is a harsh mistress.
It’s constitutional – deal with it
The House’s lead health care budget writer says his bill to force Gov. Rick Perry’s administration to explore the potential for a “Texas solution” on Medicaid expansion is dead.
Rep. John Zerwas, R-Richmond, said Tuesday that his bill outlining an expansion of coverage for poor adults using private insurance, health savings accounts and cost sharing by the beneficiaries “got hung up in Calendars.”
He was referring to the House Calendars Committee, which is the traffic cop deciding which bills go to the House floor — and in what order.
“Wasn’t anybody there to rescue it,” Zerwas said of Calendars and his measure.
Although the Calendars Committee is expected to meet Tuesday, Zerwas said the only way his bill could avoid Thursday’s midnight deadline for passing House bills would be if it were placed on Thursday’s major state calendar. That would bump it ahead of scores of bills.
“I don’t think that’s in the cards at all,” said Zerwas, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on health and human services.
I can’t claim to be surprised. It just wasn’t a priority for the powers that be. The Trib notes that even though Zerwas bent over backwards to try to accommodate Rick Perry and the slash-and-burn crowd at the TPPF, they were still agin’ it, and that was enough to bottle it up. Yes, Calendars could still schedule it ahead of a bunch of other bills, which would endanger them all since HB3791 would surely take all day to debate, and yes it could get attached as an amendment to a so-called “Christmas tree” bill, but I wouldn’t count on either of those things happening, and even if they could they probably shouldn’t. Whatever you think about this – and to me, this bill barely rates a D minus – it deserved a real hearing, with everyone having the opportunity to amend it. It shouldn’t be tacked on to something else, and it shouldn’t get its time on the floor at the expense of everything else. Let’s start talking now about how our tax dollars will now go to help expand Medicaid in New York and California, and how we won’t even get that much money to enroll people in subsidized coverage through the exchanges in large part because Rick Perry didn’t give a crap about that, either. This was always about politics, so let’s make the failure to take action be about politics, too. Texas Politics has more.