General Election and Voter Registration: Your vote matters! Texas’ general election will be held Tuesday, Nov. 3, and the voter registration deadline is coming up on Monday, Oct. 5. Now is the time to make sure you’re registered and prepared if you plan to participate.
- Voter registration: Eligible Texans must register by Monday, Oct. 5, to vote in the Nov. 3 election. Start a registration application through VoteTexas.gov, then print, sign and submit it to your county voter registrar. Everyone is encouraged to check their registration status through the Texas Secretary of State’s personal voter portal.
- Early voting: Early voting runs Monday, Oct. 19, through Friday, Oct. 30.
- Polling locations: During early voting, registered voters can cast a ballot at any polling location in their county. On Election Day, voters in counties that use countywide polling places can vote at any location in the county, while voters in other counties must vote at their assigned precinct. Find your polling locations through VoteTexas.gov. Sites are posted two days before early voting begins and two days before Election Day, so check before you go.
- Vote by mail: Texas voters who meet certain eligibility requirements may vote by mail. Applications must be received, not simply postmarked, by Friday, Oct. 23.
- Voter ID: Voters casting a ballot in person are asked to present one of seven forms of photo identification, including a driver’s license or passport. Review the list of acceptable forms of photo ID while making your plans to vote.
- Election Day: Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
Medical Malpractice in 2027: Texas established landmark medical liability reforms in 2003. Unfortunately, those protections could be under assault.
The greatest risk may not be an outright repeal of medical liability reforms. It may be a series of seemingly narrow proposals that, individually or collectively, change liability standards, expand exposure, or weaken existing protections. An example of this is indexing the statutory damages caps.
Consider these points:
- Over the last year, trial lawyers funded the Texans for Truth and Liberty PAC with $10 million to influence Republican campaigns;
- Multiple Republican officeholders in the Texas Legislature are trial attorneys by profession;
- The ad hoc coalition that protects medical malpractice has frayed; and
- The Republican Party has courted unions and other strange bedfellows in this election, meaning the ground is shifting with electoral coalitions.
For physicians, an erosion of medical malpractice protections could be existential to their practice in the state of Texas. For hospitals, it would be an untenable compounding of pain that is being felt with higher numbers of uninsured patients, looming cuts due to the OBBBA, and further stress on the state’s safety net in which hospitals are paid $9 billion below the cost of caring for Medicaid and uninsured patients in Texas (note: HCA Healthcare is the largest provider of Medicaid in Texas).
This is not a trick or treat. We may need to activate in advance of the Texas Legislature debating important policies next year. |
