YI advocated expanding healthcare access for young people, including auto-enrollment into Healthy Texas Women for 19-year olds aging out of Medicaid, state Medicaid expansion, and continuous coverage. In addition to legislative meetings, young advocates testified on Healthy Texas Women auto-enrollment and spoke on the importance of Medicaid expansion in increasing access to healthcare for young adults. One of our young advocates, Stephany Ibarra, who hopes to continue working in health policy shared her experience of working on health care expansion for women in Texas like herself. Check out more reflections from our young advocates on their work in the Texas legislative process.
Given this situation, HB 1879 sought to auto-enroll young women aging out CHIP and Medicaid into the Healthy Texas Women program. This is not a radical new proposal; this auto-enrolling process already exists for pregnant women coming off Medicaid after their pregnancy. All this bill asked, was for this same procedure for young women who would inevitably fall into the Medicaid gap that exists in Texas today. Although this bill primarily served young women, it’s still a step towards creating greater access to health care services. Healthy Texas Women is a great program that provides many services such as mammograms, STI testing, contraceptives, and various health screenings. While state programs like Healthy Texas Women provide vital treatments, they should not be seen as replacements for comprehensive health insurance. Both of the Texas programs mentioned create greater accessibility to some health care services, but they do not provide coverage for all of the treatments that a health insurance plan would.
Although programs like Healthy Texas Women exist, I was not aware of their services until I began doing advocacy work this year. The implementation of HB 1879 would have been a great way of letting young women in Texas know of the services offered to them if they qualified for this program. I have searched far and wide for any type of access to health care services, and not once did I ever run across this program throughout my searching.
Furthermore, the work put in by my colleagues and me through various meetings with legislators, and committee testimonies were not in vain. Our hard work paid off as HB 1879 was actually voted out of the Public Health Committee with a unanimous vote of 11-0; however, we never saw it get to the House floor for a vote. We hope that in the future, with the information gathered this legislative session and the bipartisan support we had for this bill, we can see this same support towards other bills creating inclusive health care for all.