The goal of the legislation was lofty: to help people who have been exonerated clear their criminal records, quickly and completely. The unexpected result? News organizations must pay hundreds of dollars in monthly fees to keep a copy of the state’s criminal records database.

The number of adult Texans with diabetes is expected to quadruple over the next three decades, a massive spike that demographers and health care experts attribute to the state’s aging population and obesity epidemic.

For years, the state paid private providers who care for people with disabilities to handle their clients’ case management. But an 11th-hour change inserted into the budget last session stripped them of that responsibility, giving it instead to quasi-governmental Mental Retardation Authorities — and potentially creating a conflict of interest.

The patient privacy advocate on why our electronic medical records are in grave danger, how they could be used to discriminate against us and what Facebook can teach health care professionals about informed consent.

Call it a bad case of adult diaper drama: Incontinence product vendors are facing off against the state comptroller’s office over plans to competitively bid underpads, catheters and other supplies for Texas Medicaid patients.

A week after newly emboldened Republicans in the Texas Legislature floated a radical cost-saving proposal — withdrawing from the federal Medicaid program — health care experts, economists and think tanks are trying to determine just how possible it would be. The answer? It’s complicated. But it’s not stopping nearly a dozen other states, frantic over budget shortfalls and anticipating new costs from federal health care reform, from exploring something that was, until recently, unthinkable.

Whether reconditioned football helmets sufficiently protect young players from concussions and other serious injuries has become a subject of fierce debate. Texas parents are torn between the desire of their kids to play and increasingly hard-to-ignore studies about the relationship between football and long-term brain damage. Coaches struggle to balance safety with fans’ cries for harder hits, bigger players and crushing wins. And at least one upstart manufacturer is contributing to the public's unease by challenging the industry’s long-standing practice of refurbishing old helmets.

The same Houston-area residential treatment center where staffers forced disabled girls to fight each other — prompting child welfare officials to halt admissions and hire a safety monitor — is now under fire for the asphyxiation of a 16-year-old boy who died Friday after a restraint was applied by a staffer in a closet.

Some Republican lawmakers are proposing an unprecedented solution to the state’s massive budget shortfall: opting out of the federal Medicaid program. But experts say the rhetoric may be more of a middle finger to Washington than sound public policy.

When the Legislature convenes in January, more than three-dozen new members will take their seats in the Texas House — almost all of them Republicans, and many as surprised to be there as you’ll be to see them. Here’s a freshman facebook to help you keep them straight.

Rick Perry won his third full term as governor of Texas on Tuesday, defeating former Houston Mayor Bill White by a convincing double-digit margin and positioning himself for a role on the national stage. And he led a Republican army that swept all statewide offices for the fourth election in a row, took out three Democratic U.S. congressmen and was on its way to a nearly two-thirds majority in the Texas House — a mark the GOP hasn't seen since the days following the Civil War.

The former first lady on life in the Governor's Mansion vs. life in the White House, her newfound freedom living in Dallas, why she kept her personal politics out of her husband's presidency, the role she's playing at the Bush Library, the two works of fiction she's reading now and her fondest memories of the Texas Book Festival, which she launched when she was living in Austin 15 years ago — and whose annual gala she'll headline tonight with a reading from her best-selling memoir, Spoken from the Heart.

Advocates say the Department of Aging and Disability Services’ baseline budget request eliminates financing for more than 13,000 people — the majority waiting to receive Medicaid waiver services. Agency officials will only say that an “unknown number” of people already receiving the services could lose them. It's unclear if lawmakers can make these cuts without risking losing federal funding; federal health care reform requires states to maintain coverage at the same level it was when the Affordable Care Act became law in March.