Health care

Lawmakers will get ready for the Easter break by kicking the budget out of the House and lining up for copies of the redistricting "working" maps they've been promised by the two chairmen in charge of political cartography. Even without redistricting, the remaining seven weeks of the session will be kinda hairy. Still on the list of things to do: The House-Senate conference on the budget, teacher health insurance, Medicaid funding, campaign finance reform, major water and air bills, a number of Sunset bills affecting major agencies, a handful of controversial criminal justice bills, transportation bills and any number of things we've left off. There's a stack of stuff to do and not much time to do it. But the focus isn't on that stuff: It's on the maps.

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They say they're not having a political fight, but if Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff and Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander were having a political fight, chances are it would look a lot like this.

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For purposes of redistricting, break the House into seven pieces. Six parts would each be comprised of members from the six largest counties in the state: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, and El Paso. The seventh group includes representatives from the other 248 counties in the state.

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When Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, went to the front microphone in the House to talk about redistricting numbers the other day, you could have heard a pin drop. The chairman of the Redistricting Committee had nothing dramatic to say; he was keeping members up to date on the U.S. Census Bureau's plan to deliver numbers any day. He said it'd take several days to load the data into the computers so that the political cartographers can get to work. He finished; everyone exhaled.

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When Bill Ratliff sits down to talk to the members of his exploratory committee after the end of the legislative session, they'll tell him a number of things they could tell him today.

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The state had a scandal cooking the last time the Legislature worked on redistricting, in 1991, and there was something brewing in 1981, and ten years or so before that. Lawmakers knew they were going to have problems with Medicaid, but had no idea that would involve anything but money.

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Explain this to your daddy: The State of Texas has $5.2 billion more money to spend over the next two years than it had during the last two years. There is probably enough money available for the state to continue to do the things it already does, even when you factor in inflation and other increases.

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Budget writers have known for months—since they first saw the numbers—that Medicaid and various other insurance and health care programs were going to stink up the next budget and stain the current one. And they even had a fair idea about the size of the odors and the spots. They've been hearing about drug prices and premiums and caseloads for the better part of the last year. The numbers are big and even alarming, but the problem has been on the radar for a while.

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Some of the same people who voted to constitutionally limit state borrowing four years ago have found a way to issue hundreds of millions of dollars in new state highway bonds without counting the new debt against that constitutional cap. Each of the three different types of bonds spelled out in current highway funding proposals would punch a skylight into the legal debt ceiling designed to brake the heavy borrowing that began during the prison-building boom of the 1990s.

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U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is seriously considering entering the race for governor of Texas, according to friends and supporters. That's contrary, mildly, to her 14-month-old pronouncement that she probably would not run against an incumbent governor. But that was during the presidential race. Hutchison herself was up for reelection to the U.S. Senate, and things were more fluid then. There had been no presidential primaries and it wasn't clear that anybody in Texas politics was going anywhere.

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The presidential election lasted too long. Then there was a new governor to swear in and a race in the Senate to name a new lieutenant governor and a mini-diaspora to Washington, D.C. Senate committees were named, then House committees, and everyone paused for the inauguration. Gov. Rick Perry will come back and make a State of the State speech this week and then, at last, this contraption will finally be rolling. It's been a weird beginning to what could be a weird year.

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Things do pile up when you're away from your desk for a holiday. All that happened during our 17th annual year-end break was the swearing in of a new president and of a new governor of Texas, the election and swearing in of a new lieutenant governor*, a major shakeup (and 24 hours later, an amendment to the shakeup) of Senate committees, and the release of U.S. Census numbers that give Texas two more seats in Congress after the 2002 elections. Oh, yeah, there's a new estimate on how much money will be available for the next two-year budget. And a mess of people changed jobs.

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Wow! Live weather metaphors! Just when the television folk ran out of descriptions for the presidential freeze-frame, it got really cold in Austin. It looked possible that it would drizzle and that the drizzle would freeze on the streets. It was dark and stormy and gray. People came to work late. Then the sun broke through, Al Gore resigned, George W. Bush accepted, and Republicans all over the Capital City started smiling again.

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Texas budgeteers are poking around in the seat cushions for $700 million in loose change to try to avoid a politically hazardous vote on spending during the first few weeks of the legislative session.

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Six weeks away from the election and most of the political conversation in Texas is about a contest that isn't even being fought in the state. You might have expected attention to turn from national stuff to local stuff by now, but local stuff isn't as interesting as the closest presidential race in the last 20 years. If you're in our business, that means you call folks to see what's happening in this race or that one, they want to talk about the presidential polls in Ohio and Florida.

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Advocates for the poor will tell you that one of their biggest complaints with the Medicaid system in Texas is the sign-up process. Texas is one of only 12 states that still require a face-to-face interview with a caseworker before someone can receive benefits. It's one of only five states that require both the interview and the so-called assets test that uses what someone owns in addition to their income level to determine whether they're eligible for benefits. And the forms are complicated.

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Most Texas politicos came out of the Labor Day weekend in seasonally optimistic moods. This is their moment and it begins with every entrant a potential winner. And the watching is promising, too: As the gates spring open and the races start, the Republicans and Democrats are planning or fearing or predicting anything from skirmish to war in nearly a dozen-and-a-half legislative seats.

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Don't get all cocky just because there is no budget deficit. The cure for high financial hopes can be found in the newest files at the Legislative Budget Board or in any number of budgeteers' offices at the Capitol. State agencies are presenting their boring old Legislative Appropriations Requests, detailing what they believe they'll need during the next two-year budget cycle.

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Sen. Frank Madla, D-San Antonio, is under investigation by a federal grand jury that has peppered Texas government with subpoenas over the last several weeks. The panel is apparently trying to find out whether Madla or a member of his family benefited from some action he took while in office, but none of the information that has so far become public appears to support any such claim.

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Sheesh, before you get all bothered about the grand mal disaster in the state budget, take a breath. There is no grand mal disaster in the state budget. What you've got -- as we've noted in detail over the last couple of months -- is a situation where the state has several agencies with budget messes of varying degrees of difficulty, and plenty of money to clean it all up. What you've also got is a presidential campaign and lots of people who'd like to put this in the worst light.

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