A bill aimed to reform end-of-life care in Texas is likely to die in the state House. Although the bill made it through the Texas Senate, Representative Lois Kolkhorst, a Brenham Republican, told the Austin American-Statesman that it won't get a vote due to splits among House Republicans.

Currently if doctors believe continuing treatment would needlessly extend suffering, they can ask an ethics committee -- usually consisting of other doctors, social workers and clergy -- to stop life-sustaining treatment. If the patient or family wants to continue treatment, they have 10 days to appeal the decision and find another provider.

The most contentious parts of the bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Bob Deuell of Greenville, aims to revise this process, providing families with 21 days to find alternate care instead of 10 as well as giving them more days to prepare for the ethics panel.

As we reported in April, Texas pro-life groups have been bitterly split over the bill from the beginning. Its demise comes just as Duell and Texas Right to Life director Elizabeth Graham have been going at each other's throat's, Texas Tribune .

Deuell compared the pro-life group to "the woman that went to Solomon and wanted the baby to be cut in two," and took issue with Graham's claims in emails that the bill would "strengthen Texas' death panels."

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Medical City

It's always been nearly impossible to compare prices between hospitals. For one, most people who find themselves in an emergency room don't have the leisure to shop around. Even if they do, where are they going to turn? Healthcare providers don't typically put their prices on billboards. The opacity of pricing is one of the many, many reasons the health-care market is broken and Medical City can charge D Editor Tim Rogers $7,600 for a cookie.

The Obama administration took a significant step toward making the market more rational. Last week, it released a humongous spreadsheet listing the "chargemaster" prices that every single hospital in the country bills Medicare for each of 100 common inpatient procedures.

As Steven Brill noted in Time, Medicare basically ignores this number, then uses expense data provided by the hospital to decide how much it pays. For instance, Medical City bills the government $76,125 to treat a patient suffering from kidney failure with major complications. What Medicare actually pays is $12,836.

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Dallas Area Interfaith

Interfaith groups from across Texas held a rally for healthcare expansion on February 20.

Dallas Area Interfaith held a news conference this morning at Temple Emanu-El, where more than a dozen faith leaders from the Dallas area gathered to support Medicaid expansion. Since Friday, 60 clergy members from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations have signed a letter calling on state lawmakers to opt in for the Medicaid expansion offered in the Affordable Care Act. The DAI will deliver the letter tomorrow to Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst.

The letter reads, in part:

We believe humanity rises to our highest fulfillment as we treat each person with dignity, precisely as we ourselves would hope to be treated. We acknowledge our enduring responsibility to care for one another. As faith leaders, we believe expanding healthcare in Texas should be inclusive, affordable, accessible, and accountable and should strengthen the lives of the working poor and better enable Texans to take care of themselves and their families.

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At first glance -- and second, and third -- Attorney General Greg Abbott's opinion on Monday that cities, counties, and school districts are barred by the Texas Constitution from offering health benefits to the domestic partners of employees would seem to be a stumbling block on the road toward equal treatment for gays and lesbians.

That's not, by and large, how it's being taken by advocates of domestic partner benefits. Sure, there were the obligatory complaints from the ACLU and others on the left, but local governments that already extend coverage to same-sex partners seem inclined to ignore Abbott's directive. And Equality Texas, an Austin-based advocacy group, immediately called the opinion a "huge win."

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Change.org

Kaitlyn Sameuls and family.

We've written about Kaitlyn Samuels twice: Once last February when her parents went before a military judge to argue that Tricare, the Department of Defense's health insurer, should cover therapy costs for their severely disabled daughter, and again in October after Tricare ignored the judge's order to do so.

Kaitlyn suffers from scoliosis, epilepsy, cerebral palsy and a host of other ailments that have left her without the ability to chew, speak or walk. Her brain is comparable to that of a toddler, meaning she doesn't do well in traditional physical therapy. She became much more engaged, and the therapy became markedly more effective, when she began going to Rocky Top Therapy Services, where her physical therapist would go through their routine.

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Last week, Texas Alliance for Life paused briefly in its crusade to enact increasingly onerous abortion restrictions and shifted its focus to the other end of the human lifespan. The group urged its supporters to lobby for passage of SB 303, state Senator Bob Deuell's bill to reform end-of-life care in Texas.

Currently, doctors are allowed to stop treatment on patients if they determine it's medically futile. If that decision conflicts with the wishes of the patient or their family, state law give them 10 days to find another provider and appeal the decision to a hospital ethics committee, according to the New York Times.

Deuell's proposal would tweak the process by extending the time frame for finding another provider to 14 days. It would also give patients and surrogates help accessing medical records and navigating the appeals process.

"There are times when medical treatment is inappropriate and death is inevitable," Deuell told the Times. Barring doctors or ethics committees from participating in the process could "let a family subject a loved one to a lot of truly unnecessary, perhaps painful and harmful treatment."

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The West Nile virus is officially back. Public health officials got their first confirmation of that last week when mosquito pools in Richardson tested positive for the disease. Today, Highland Park announced a positive test of its own. Dallas County is already urging residents to use insect repellant, drain standing water and dress in long sleeves and pants.

This is all happening very early. Last year, the tests didn't start coming back positive until well into May, and that wound up being the worst West Nile season in Dallas County history, killing 19 people and sickening 398. It's enough to call up flashbacks of planes dosing the city with clouds of possibly toxic chemicals and make you wonder: Is this the new model? Is 2013 going to be just as bad as 2012? Is West Nile now like the professional baseball season, with the end of the World Series bleeding into spring training with barely a pause?

"Not having a crystal ball, there's no way to know," says Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson. "I think we know that there will be positive mosquitoes, as we've already found. If that's the case, we could have West Nile human cases."

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Congratulations, Texas! After a lot of hard work and many long nights, we're number one in the nation for repeat teen births. According to the Centers for Disease Control, which released a new report on April 2, in 2010, 22 percent of Texas teenagers aged 15-19 who gave birth were delivering their second (or third, or fourth) child. We even beat Mississippi, which came in second, and way outpaced those underachievers in New Hampshire, which has the lowest rate of repeat teen birth in the nation (less than 10 percent of their delivering teens had already given birth before).

So, who and what do we have to thank for this stunning achievement? Let's just list 'em off.

Abstinence-only sex education: A little background: States with abstinence-only sex education policies have long been found to have the highest rates of teen pregnancy. According to the CDC, only 29 percent of Texas schools teach "four key topics related to condom use." A 2009 report from the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) found that most school districts in Texas teach some form of abstinence-only education. Those districts, and even some that teach "abstinence-plus" sex ed, are guilty of "downplaying the effectiveness of condoms in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," the report said.

One of the state's health textbooks, Essentials of Health and Wellness, mentions the word "condom" once, according to the TFN report. The other three approved health textbooks never use that word at all. And if they're not discussing condoms, you better believe most Texas school districts aren't discussing birth control pills, IUDs, or any other pregnancy prevention method besides "cross your legs and think of your eternal salvation."

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In 2011, as we just cannot seem to stop mentioning, your state legislators cut $73 million from the state's family planning budget, instituted a tiered funding system designed to give family planning clinics any federal dollars dead last, and launched a weird war on the Medicaid Women's Health Program. All of this was in the name of halting those wanton, rampant, state- and federally funded abortions, a thing that doesn't actually exist. The impacts of all these cuts were clear from a mile off: a study last September in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that they were dismantling "a safety net that took decades to build and could not easily be recreated."

Nonsense, said Texas' Health and Human Services Commission. Among other pieces of "evidence," they released a deeply sketchy report that purported to show that even without Planned Parenthood, the new Texas Women's Health Program would easily be able to serve absolutely everybody who needed a new doctor. They did that, somehow, without even talking to more than half the family planning providers in the state.

Now, UT Austin has teamed up with a number of other research entities to form the Texas Policy Evaluation Project . It's meant to assess the impact of the reproductive healthcare cuts at a local level; they've even created a handy little app so you can look at just how many people in your county no longer have access to affordable healthcare.

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Maybe you're not a Yiddish speaker, but you need a handy illustration of the concept of "chutzpah." In Spanish: cojones. Or in English, if you insist: king-sized brass balls. If you need a real-world demonstration of this cross-cultural concept, you have only to look at how your state-level bureaucrats have behaved in their fight with the feds over family planning money. As of yesterday, it's proven to be a money-losing strategy -- $13 million, to be exact.

In the 2011 legislative session, Texas lawmakers cut $73 million -- a full two-thirds -- of the state family planning budget, as well as instituting a tiered funding structure to make sure that family planning clinics got any remaining money dead last, after hospitals and federally qualified healthcare centers. All of that was somehow meant to prevent abortions, which family planning funds never paid for to begin with.

But the state wasn't quite done with their assault on family planning: This time last year, Texas was insisting it could bar Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid Women's Health Program, for which the feds paid 90 percent of the cost. When federal health officials told the state that was illegal, Texas refused to back down. Fine, the feds said, and cut all federal funding to the WHP. Texas insisted it would be just fine without Planned Parenthood or the feds (and continues to say that, despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. )

Despite all this feuding, for some reason, Texas still believed it would be awarded a whole lot of money from the feds in Title X grant funding (Title X being the money that can only go towards family planning efforts). Late yesterday, the feds chose instead to award that cash to a coalition of women's health groups, under the logic that the group could serve more patients than the state's program. That coalition includes Planned Parenthood. That one must sting.

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