Health care

It’s usually best to take your medicine fast, in one ugly gulp, like mom used to say. But House leaders, apparently confident they can pass a major tax bill and an ambitious rewriting of the state’s school finance system, decided to let both measures sit unprotected over a long weekend.

Mention March 2006 to political people in Texas, and you’ll trigger a conversation about the top of the ballot. But March 2006 — the month of the primaries and, in particular, the Republican primaries — is on the minds of a fair number of legislators who want to remain in office after this term.

Can you remember a particular State of the State speech? That’s not meant as a slap at Gov. Rick Perry — we’re just noting the historical significance of the form. What’s useful about these spiels is that they tell you what direction a governor hopes a Legislature will take. It’s where Perry said he wanted a reexamination of some death penalty issues four years ago, for instance. This year, his list was devoid of surprises, but gave listeners a sense of his direction. Some highlights:

Two weeks ago, the smart guys were betting there’d be $1 billion to $2 billion in red ink in the state’s starting budget. Instead, it’s in the black, though it will probably swing from one inkwell to the other in the next few weeks.

Piece number one fell into place Monday, when Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn announced the state’s financial fortunes have improved over two years ago and the ugly budget fight that ensued then might be avoided this time around. Budgeteers, nervous about Strayhorn’s steady political attacks on Gov. Rick Perry, were braced for worse news. Instead, her numbers were within a hair’s breadth of their own predictions about state income.

State District Judge John Dietz, ruling on the heels of closing arguments, said the state’s system of funding public schools is unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to fix it within a year. His detailed ruling won’t be out for a couple of weeks, but if you do a quick calculation of what he said so far, it’s easy to argue that the state will have to spend another $3 billion or so each year on public education. That’s in addition to any money that would be used lowering local property taxes. (Click here for a copy of Dietz’s bench ruling.)

Political journalists are often called fight promoters — people who’ll try to start a contest where there isn’t one — but the state’s senior senator and the governor are making the job easy. They’re even giving us facts to play with, and starting the fights without much prompting from the likes of us.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census prefaced the Republican Party’s national convention with a bummer of a report that says, among other things, that Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured people of any state and that the median income here dropped during the first years of this decade.

Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, is in a pretty safe district for a Democrat, as these things go. In the last election against his current opponent, Jeffrey Hibbs, Dunnam pulled 60.2 percent of the vote. And with the exception of Tony Sanchez Jr., who lost by a little in this House district while losing by a lot statewide, the Democrats running for statewide office in Dunnam’s district swept in 2002.

State auditors say managers of the Children’s Health Insurance Program let about $20 million slip away in the form of “unnecessary or excessive payments to Clarendon National Insurance Co.,” the company that had a provider contract for CHIP. The payments, the auditors wrote, “constitute an abuse of the commission’s fiduciary responsibility to oversee and manage” the contract. CHIP is administered by the Health and Human Services Commission, which is in the midst of a massive reorganization and an investigation of lapses in protective services for adults and children.