Dianne Delisi
R Temple
SHE IS THE MOST underrated member of the Legislature, due to her low-key style and the mind-numbing vocabulary that is designed to shield health care policy, the area in which she performs her good works, from ordinary human understanding.
A case in point: She passed a bill whose description read, “relating to the Medicaid managed care delivery system.” Perhaps if the title had been more stimulating—say, “relating to stopping the greedy HMOs and their even greedier lobbyist from putting in the fix with the bureaucracy so that the health plans make profits while local hospitals get the shaft”—more folks might have realized that she was taking on the governor, whose chief of staff happens to be her own daughter-in-law, in an effort to prevent a catastrophic loss of federal matching funds for big urban hospitals ($50 million for Dallas’s Parkland alone) that serve Medicaid patients. Maybe she would be better off if she tooted her own horn a little instead of reading in a bland monotone (“Integrated care management better aligns risk and incentives,” blah, blah, snore) and sharing credit with her Public Health Committee members. But don’t be fooled: What you see of Delisi is only 10 percent of what’s there. The rest, as with an iceberg, is submerged.
She passed two other major bills this session, one preserving funding for trauma centers and the other trying to shift Medicaid care from emergency rooms to clinics and homes. But the way she runs her committee is just as important as her legislation. “It was like the old days,” says Garnet Coleman, a partisan Houston Democrat who has long been active in health care. “There were no R’s and no D’s. Just good public policy.”
R Temple
SHE IS THE MOST underrated member of the Legislature, due to her low-key style and the mind-numbing vocabulary that is designed to shield health care policy, the area in which she performs her good works, from ordinary human understanding.
A case in point: She passed a bill whose description read, “relating to the Medicaid managed care delivery system.” Perhaps if the title had been more stimulating—say, “relating to stopping the greedy HMOs and their even greedier lobbyist from putting in the fix with the bureaucracy so that the health plans make profits while local hospitals get the shaft”—more folks might have realized that she was taking on the governor, whose chief of staff happens to be her own daughter-in-law, in an effort to prevent a catastrophic loss of federal matching funds for big urban hospitals ($50 million for Dallas’s Parkland alone) that serve Medicaid patients. Maybe she would be better off if she tooted her own horn a little instead of reading in a bland monotone (“Integrated care management better aligns risk and incentives,” blah, blah, snore) and sharing credit with her Public Health Committee members. But don’t be fooled: What you see of Delisi is only 10 percent of what’s there. The rest, as with an iceberg, is submerged.
She passed two other major bills this session, one preserving funding for trauma centers and the other trying to shift Medicaid care from emergency rooms to clinics and homes. But the way she runs her committee is just as important as her legislation. “It was like the old days,” says Garnet Coleman, a partisan Houston Democrat who has long been active in health care. “There were no R’s and no D’s. Just good public policy.”
Add your comment »