Rep. Lois Kolkhorst threw herself a life raft tonight, attaching her Health Care Compact bill — a measure that would seek to give Texas control of the purse strings for Medicare and Medicaid — onto a Senate health care bill that the House passed on third reading.

Rep. Lois Kolkhorst is holding Sen. Jane Nelson's health reform bill hostage. 

Gov. Rick Perry has delivered his fiscal message loud and clear: Balance the cash-strapped state budget with cuts, not with the Rainy Day Fund or new taxes. Yet some of his most loyal advisers, past and future, are representing clients beating a very different drum.

Texas’ efforts to take control over Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care program for poor children and the disabled, could be in trouble.

After a testy exchange, House lawmakers gave an initial OK to a voting bill that would push up the election filing period in order to give military voters more time to get absentee ballots.

House lawmakers have given the first OK to a key piece of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's health reform plan, after efforts to turn the bill into a health care Christmas tree fell short.

State lawmakers have fired back against a Federal Trade Commission letter suggesting Senate Bill 8 — a key piece of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's health reform push — violates antitrust laws. The measure is expected to come up for a vote in the House on Tuesday. 

For the third session in a row, legislation covering end-of-life care in Texas appears, well, dead. 

House lawmakers successfully tacked a statewide smoking ban onto a broad Senate fiscal matters bill last weekend. But whether it will stick in the upper chamber is another question entirely. 

The state's family planning budget is getting increasingly thin. Budget conferees appear poised to go with the cheapest possible option for offering minimal family planning services, and a Medicaid program that provides screenings and contraception is circling the drain.

The residency programs that train Texas family physicians will take a big hit under the education budget agreement lawmakers unveiled today. 

The budget that state lawmakers are poised to accept attempts to eliminate wide variations in what hospitals are paid by Medicaid for performing the same procedures on similarly sick patients — a sweeping change in how Texas hospitals are funded.

Texas medical schools feel like the scorned children of the state’s education budget. Lost amid the pleas of parents to restore funding for public education, and the demands of college students to preserve financial aid, the state’s health care institutions say few seem to understand the drastic situation they face. 

Don't stub out the statewide smoking ban bill yet. The bill's House and Senate authors say they've got a vehicle for the measure to be passed, and they're still hopeful Texas will be the first southern state to outlaw the habit in restaurants, bars and most public places. 

The emails and memos written by administrators and doctors at Victoria's Citizens Medical Center about three of their colleagues of Indian descent are, at best, derogatory. At worst, they could be seen as racist — and they're the subject of a sweeping discrimination suit.