Health Care
The Texas Observer’s Best Features of 2018
We Support Pre-Existing Condition Protections, Say Republicans Who’ve Repeatedly Tried to Eliminate Them
A Texas lawsuit has put the ACA’s popular pre-existing conditions provision front and center ahead of midterms, to the chagrin of Republicans who have vehemently opposed the law for years.
“Everyone agrees we’re going to protect pre-existing conditions,” Senator Ted Cruz said in a debate this month. Yes, the same Ted Cruz who forced a federa...Read More
Meet Mikael Love, the OB-GYN Who Doesn’t Prescribe Birth Control
Love, who has delivered babies in the capital city for more than two decades, has a long track record of anti-abortion politics.
This summer, during a federal trial over Texas’ fetal burial law, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights set out to demonstrate the anti-abortion ...Read More
Without Planned Parenthood, Almost Half the Providers in Texas’ Women’s Health Program Saw No Patients
Women’s health advocates say the high percentage of providers seeing few, if any, clients is “alarming.”
For years, the Texas health agency has claimed that its Healthy Texas Women program is thriving. After Planned Parenthood was booted out in 2013, state official...Read More
Texas Ends Contracts for Anti-Abortion Group Tapped to Provide Women’s Health Services
The announcement comes two weeks after the Observer reported that the Heidi Group served just 3,300 of the 70,000 patients it promised.
The Texas health agency announced late on Friday that it will terminate the state’s multi-million-dollar family planning contracts with the Heidi Group, the a...Read More
Texas Anti-Abortion Family Planning Group Promised to Serve 70,000 Women. It Served 3,300.
But the state keeps renewing its multimillion-dollar contract.
Anti-abortion activist Carol Everett had no experience running a family planning program when the state of Texas awarded her millions in taxpayer funds to help ...Read More
Ken Paxton Wants to Eliminate the ACA’s Pre-Existing Condition Protections. How Would That Affect Texans?
More than a quarter of adults in Texas have a pre-existing condition that could make them unable to get health coverage without the ACA’s requirements.
The stories aren’t hard to find: the young uninsured woman who was hit with a $137,000 bill for brain cancer treatment. The woman whose insurance company dela...Read More
Judge Blocks Texas’ ‘Near Catastrophic’ Fetal Burial Law
A state law requiring women to bury or cremate fetal remains from miscarriages and abortions has been blocked by a federal judge.
A federal judge blocked Texas’ fetal burial law on Wednesday, writing that the legislation would “likely cause a near catastrophic failure of the healthcare...Read More
Reformers Hopeful the 2019 Legislature will Expand Texas’ Medical Marijuana Law
Activists are mapping a path to end arrests for possession and broaden the state's medical marijuana program ahead of the next legislative session.
Shortly after returning to Washington state in 2007 from a 16-month deployment in Afghanistan, retired U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant April Martinez began suffer...Read More
How Anti-Abortion Activists are Training Their ‘Next Generation of Pro-Life Leaders’
College students descended on Houston to learn how to "convert" their peers to oppose abortion and how to "dismantle" Roe v. Wade.
This summer, nearly 30 college students gathered in Houston for a weeklong summit on how they could be the generation to end abortion in America. One day, after...Read More