Healthy Vision 2025 Launched – TMA’s Advocacy Agenda for Health

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The Texas Medical Association today formally launched Healthy Vision 2025, the association’s strategic advocacy plan to “put the health back into health care.”

 

The 31-page document focuses on TMA’s advocacy goals for the 2019 Texas Legislature. “But,” TMA President Doug Curran, MD, pointed out during a sneak preview for TMA leaders Saturday, “as the name suggests, Healthy Vision 2025 encompasses a long-term strategy.”

The plan details 75 explicit recommendations for the legislature and espouses six broad themes:

  • Return or protect physicians’ role as chief clinical decisionmaker along with their patients, and rebuff interference from insurance companies, government agencies, pharmacy, and corporate health care interests.
  • Expand access to health care for all Texans, including by increasing Medicaid payments and the rural physician workforce.
  • Bolster maternal health, public health, and behavioral health services and infrastructure.
  • Hold health insurance companies accountable for the products they sell.
  • Prevent nonphysician practitioners from expanding their legal scope of practice beyond what their education, training, and skills safely allow.
  • Protect Texas’ 2003 liability reforms.

Healthy Vision outlines evidence that supports Dr. Curran’s assessment that “patient care in Texas is at a critical crossroads.” It cites the nation’s highest uninsurance rate and one of the lowest number of physicians per-capita, abuses by insurers and non-physician corporations, “alarming” rates of maternal and infant mortality, and woefully inadequate Medicaid and Medicare payments.

“In this, our fourth Healthy Vision document, the physicians of TMA share stories that illustrate these problems, and we outline our solutions,” Dr. Curran said. “We look forward to working with the members of the Texas Legislature and the agencies that oversee and regulate health care to achieve our healthy vision for the people of this great state and for those of us who have dedicated our careers to caring for them.”

TMA staff and leaders already have delivered the document to all 181 members of the legislature, to the Capitol press corps, and to other key players. For the next two weeks, a TMA campaign of paid advertisements and social media outreach will further promote Healthy Vision 2025 and its legislative recommendations.

How can you get involved?

Last Updated On

March 09, 2021

Originally Published On

January 28, 2019

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