White coats invade Texas Capitol for First Tuesdays
ATTENTION, MEDICAL STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS. Join your col- leagues, established physicians, and TMA Alliance members April 7 for the dedicated Students and Residents First Tuesdays at the Capitol lobby day! The TMA lobbying team will pro- vide briefings on the issues most im- portant to you. Receive talking points and grassroots training, then march to the Capitol and make a difference for your future. Register today at
www.texmed.org/
firsttuesdays. First Tuesdays at the Capitol has
“We must gather together to ensure a healthy environment for physicians and a healthier Texas for all of its citizens.”
been the key to physicians’ successes in the Texas Legislature since it began in 2003. State senators and represen- tatives listen when their hometown doctors visit their offices. “2003 was the year when medicine
scored an astounding victory in our struggle for tort reform,” said First Tuesdays Chair Susan Todd, a TMA Alliance member from Fort Worth.
“And then our efforts with Proposi- tion 12 made the legislation ‘stick’ as the Texas Constitution was changed to make the legislation binding. This
year, we must gather together to pro- tect the work we’ve done in years past to ensure a healthy environment for physicians and a healthier Texas for all of its citizens.” While at the Capitol, the white-
coated hordes share TMA’s 2015 leg- islative agenda — based on TMA’s Healthy Vision 2020, Second Edition
— with their elected leaders. (See tma .tips/TMA2015Agenda and www.tex
med.org/healthyvision for details.) The top 10 items on this year’s list are:
• Increase funding for graduate med- ical education.
• Improve physicians’ Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Pro- gram payments to more appropri- ately reflect the services they pro- vide to patients.
• Hold health insurance companies accountable for creating and pro- moting adequate networks.
• Devise and enact a system for pro- viding health care to low-income Texans that improves efficiencies by reducing bureaucracy and pa- perwork.
• Stop any efforts to expand scope of practice beyond that safely permit- ted by nonphysician practitioners’ education, training, and skills.
Physicians from Travis County Medical Society share medicine’s legislative agenda with State Sen. Judith Zafirini (D-Laredo).
22 TEXAS MEDICINE April 2015
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