Implementing a key piece of federal health care reform in Texas — something Gov. Rick Perry has expressed his firm opposition to — may be back on the table.

It doesn’t include a “sick tax.” But the Senate version of the state’s 2012-13 budget still takes direct aim at hospitals, in an effort to find hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and narrow the state’s revenue gap.

Republican lawmakers have vowed to close the budget hole without a new tax. But that hasn’t stopped Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, from proposing a penny per ounce tax on soft drinks.

After a fierce fight, the state’s leading physician groups won a change in legislation backed predominantly by Texas chiropractors that could have prevented one health care licensing agency from challenging the ruling of another in court.

A bill designed to find cost savings and efficiencies in Texas' costly Medicaid program — and, more controversially, expand managed care into the Rio Grande Valley — is moving to Senate budget writers for consideration. 

The Congressional budget deal reached in Washington this weekend could have dire implications for Texas’ federally qualified health centers — clinics that provide comprehensive care for the uninsured.

If congressional Republicans' proposed solution to cutting health care costs — giving states block grants to fund Medicaid — sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Want to die comfortably? Move to Corpus Christi. A study of national hospice and hospitalization trends shows the percentage of Medicare patients dying in hospitals there, as opposed to at home or in hospice, is dropping fast. 

The state’s two leading anti-abortion groups — Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life — agree on where life begins, but not on a law governing how it may come to an end. A house committee will take up the issue today. 

Tenet Healthcare Corp., a Dallas-based hospital company under siege by Community Health Systems, has sued its competitor and potential parent for allegedly overbilling Medicare.

When Ellen Cohen decided, two months after losing re-election to her state House seat, to run for Houston City Council, a friend worried, “Isn’t that a step down?” Cohen’s answer? “No, it’s a step closer.”

Use our app to see what hospitals would have to pay in taxes, and whether they'd come out ahead or behind in total revenue, if one version of a "quality assurance fee," or hospital tax, were on the books.

Some pediatric dentists are bad-mouthing a bill that would allow mobile dental clinics to be paid by Medicaid for sealing the teeth of low-income kids at school.

Is "family planning" a euphemism for abortion? For many House Republicans, yes. It's not that they don't understand the difference — it's that they don't trust family planning clinics not to steer women toward abortions.

Talk has resumed in the Senate — albeit quietly — about a so-called quality assurance fee, a revenue generator that would effectively tax hospitals to prop up the state’s cash-strapped Medicaid program.