BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – A recent report ranks Texas the second worst state in the country for women’s reproductive health.

Among people of reproductive age, Texas also has one of the highest rates of being uninsured.

Theresa Morris, the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University said on Tuesday that part of the issue is the expense of reproductive health in Texas.

“Texas has the strictest requirements to be on Medicaid and in fact, working adults don’t qualify to be on Medicaid unless they’re caregivers, disabled, pregnant, or over 65. Then the Affordable Care Act does have subsidized insurance. But one has to make 100% of the poverty level to enter that exchange. So, it’s called the gap, and they’re about, I think, 800,000 people in Texas who are in this gap,” Morris explained.

This report wasn’t all bad news for Texas, especially when it comes to mortality rates.

“Texas has put resources into addressing maternal mortality and infant mortality. There’s a maternal mortality and review board that does biennial reviews, and so that, I think, is why you’re seeing those numbers a little bit better. There are over 40 measures on this report card and Texas didn’t do poorly in all of them,” said Morris.

One of the things Morris said Texas could do to address the issue was expand Medicaid.

“Think about who to vote for issues that you might support and write to your Congress person about that, and I also think support, community birth, and home birth and midwives. That’s a place where the maternity deserts are served. These are certified, professional midwives who are all over Texas serving many of those deserts, and we even have some in our community. We have a birth center, Jubilee Birth Center in our community, and also focusing on how do we expand healthcare access,” Morris added.

Copyright 2024 KBTX. All rights reserved.

There are few things that Texas Longhorns and Texas A&M Aggies can agree about these days.

Especially now, with the Longhorns invading the SEC, where the Aggies have been attempting to establish their own identity for over a decade.

However, during the Texas High School Coaches Association Convention on Monday in San Antonio, it became clear that Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian and Aggies coach Mike Elko were united on one front – their opposition to moving up Early Signing Day.

The proposed rule, which would have moved up Early Signing Day from December to June – before the start of prospects’ senior seasons – was tabled by college commissioners in June, meaning at some point the discussions could theoretically resurface.

And when asked about the potentially ground breaking new policy, both coaches gave strong stances against it.

“I’m a little bit more hesitant maybe than others to have a signing date in the summer when you are not giving kids the chance to play their senior year of high school football,” Sarkisian said. “I think you learn a lot about players their senior year. We continue to evaluate the tape into the senior season… Development is so critical from ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade.”

Elko echoed Sarkisian Sentiments, but also brought up a separate point of opposition.

According to Elko, the implementation of such a rule could change high school football forever, and result in mass amounts of prospects reclassifying and leaving for college a year early.

Elko its staunchly against such an idea.

“I am 1,000% opposed to that,” Elko said. “If you add a summer signing date, I think you run the risk of creating more kids wanting to reclassify and skip their senior year of high school. If you look at what happened when we moved the signing date to December, now 80 percent of the kids enroll in the spring. If you project that out and move the signing date to June, I think over the course of three, four, five years, you are going to start having 50, 60, 70 percent of the kids reclassifying.”

Fortunately, the discussions about the proposed rule have no timetable to return, and it seems that the current calendar will remain in place for at least the next year of two.

And ccording to Sarkisian, that is what is best for the high school players themselves.

“I kind of like the calendar that we’re having this year, with that signing period in early December and then you get into the portal,” Sarkisian said. “I still think we’re protecting the high school player. Last year, the high school player was not protected, where the signing date was in the middle of December and the portal opened and some schools were dropping high school kids because they were taking the portal kid.”

The Public Health Emergency declared for Texas by US health authorities this month will cut through bureaucratic hurdles to lifesaving care, but disaster prevention efforts are a more efficient use of federal dollars, scholars of health and environmental law said.

Southeast Texas, including Houston, faced back-to-back disasters earlier this month after Hurricane Beryl was followed closely by a powerful heat wave. The storm left more than one million residents sweltering without electricity or air conditioning as heat indexes surpassed 100 degrees, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The sequence of extreme weather was deadly: 15 deaths in Harris County, which includes Houston, had been attributed to Hurricane Beryl as of July 22, local officials said. Seven of those deaths were caused by heat amid power outages due to the storm.

“Often the more serious problems are either the second or the third disaster,” said Robert Verchick, a professor of disaster and climate change law at Loyola University New Orleans and a former Environmental Protection Agency official in the Obama administration. “It’s like a row of dominoes, and not having electricity for a week is a serious public health problem.”

The public health emergency for Texas, declared by the HHS on July 12, followed a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden that unlocked federal resources to aid recovery efforts.

“The combination of severe heat and limited access to electricity is dangerous, especially for vulnerable populations and those relying on electricity-dependent durable medical equipment and certain healthcare services,” Dawn O’Connell, HHS’ assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said in a statement announcing the agency’s emergency declaration.

Cutting Red Tape

While a major disaster declaration is more “infrastructure oriented,” the public health emergency is focused on “dealing with the people hurt from the storm and dealing with the people hurt from the extreme heat,” said Jean Su, senior attorney and energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The emergency declaration is essentially a tool to cut through regulatory red tape that would impede the ability of healthcare providers to respond quickly during a disaster, said Dr. David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer for the University of Texas System.

“There’s a lot of reporting and deadlines and those types of things that get in the way of a hospital being able to respond,” said Lakey, a former commissioner of the state’s health department. “The emergency just takes some of that bureaucratic work off the table for a while for them to be able to concentrate on caring for these individuals.”

Dialysis patients, for example, may have a care provider that’s unable to operate after the hurricane, Lakey said. The emergency declaration would allow them to quickly receive treatment elsewhere, and also to replace supplies they may have lost in the storm, he said.

The emergency declaration unlocks emergency funds and allows HHS to take steps including modifying certain privacy and telemedicine requirements, adjusting Medicare reimbursements, deploying additional personnel, and more.

But Verchick urged officials to invest more resources in preparing for disasters ahead of time, rather than solely reacting once they happen.

“Of course responding to disasters is extremely important, but it’s more important to take actions that prevent the harms to begin with,” he said. “That is money that goes so much further in the prevention stage than it does in the recovery stage.”

Additional efforts to protect against extreme heat would be particularly helpful in predominantly Black and Latino communities, Verchick said. Those places often face disproportionate harm from high temperatures because of policies that have funneled mitigation resources toward wealthier and whiter areas.

The Texas public health emergency is the first such declaration HHS has made this year, though it has twice renewed public health emergencies for wildfire recovery in Hawaii and for the opioid epidemic nationwide. The agency declared five public health emergencies in 2023.