2025 · Regular session · House bill
HB138
HB138 creates a program at UTHealth Houston's Center for Health Care Data to examine proposed health-insurance requirements before lawmakers enact them.
Official caption: Relating to the establishment of the Health Impact, Cost, and Coverage Analysis Program; authorizing a fee.
Official report lists House author(s): Dean, Paul, Gerdes, Hull, Leach. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.
Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.
Bill highlights
Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.
- HB138 creates a program at UTHealth Houston's Center for Health Care Data to examine proposed health-insurance requirements before lawmakers enact them.
- What gets studied: proposals requiring coverage of a service, changing payments to providers, or imposing a new contractual or administrative requirement.
- Public reports, protected individual responses: reports must go to legislative leaders and committees and be posted on a generally accessible website within 60 days of a request, or 30 days during a regular legislative session.
- Who pays: an annual fee funds the program, assessed on issuers subject to the HMO and preferred-provider-plan chapters.
- The bill became law without the governor's signature on June 20, 2025, with immediate effect.
What does it do?
HB138 creates a program at UTHealth Houston’s Center for Health Care Data to examine proposed health-insurance requirements before lawmakers enact them. It is an information program, not a new medical benefit or a power to veto legislation. Requests may come from the lieutenant governor, House speaker, or the chair or vice chair of an appropriate legislative committee, whether or not the legislature is in session. The program may not receive a request under this law to analyze already-enacted legislation. Final law.
What gets studied: proposals requiring coverage of a service, changing payments to providers, or imposing a new contractual or administrative requirement. The analysis must consider applicable health outcomes, medical evidence, access, costs and savings for patients, insurers, employers, providers and government. It uses the existing statewide claims database and scientific or peer-reviewed literature. If a reliable assessment is not possible, the report must explain why rather than invent a number. Workers’ compensation is excluded from the law’s coverage definitions. Final law, Sections 38.451–38.454.
Public reports, protected individual responses: reports must go to legislative leaders and committees and be posted on a generally accessible website within 60 days of a request, or 30 days during a regular legislative session. The insurance commissioner must issue requested administrative-expense data calls within 30 days, or 10 during a regular session. Issuers must respond before the later of the tenth day after issuance or a date set by the center. Individual insurer responses are protected from public disclosure, but the public report must include the request and complete aggregated responses, including their calculation methods. Assigned center employees cannot simultaneously work for, or hold an ownership or other personal interest in, a health-plan issuer or administrator. Final law, Sections 38.456–38.458.
Who pays: an annual fee funds the program, assessed on issuers subject to the HMO and preferred-provider-plan chapters. Fees are based on estimated program expenses and divided according to covered lives. Specified state-employee, school-employee/retiree and university-employee benefit plans are exempt, as are issuers operating solely as Medicaid managed-care organizations. This is narrower than exempting every company that also has Medicaid business. Fees generally are due August 1; special transition rules apply to the 2025 assessment. The law does not set a flat dollar amount or charge patients directly. Final law, Section 38.455.
The bill became law without the governor’s signature on June 20, 2025, with immediate effect. It required the program to be established by January 1, 2026, and included initial cost-estimate and enrollment-report instructions. Those are legal deadlines, not a finding here that implementation was completed on time. Official history; final transition provisions.
What changed along the way?
The House substitute expanded the analysis beyond costs, adding public-health evidence, existing coverage, short- and longer-term estimates, structured data collection, aggregated public reporting and employee conflict rules. It added committee vice chairs as requesters, shortened the regular-session report deadline from 45 to 30 days, and replaced a data call limited to the five largest affected issuers with one reaching affected issuers as the commissioner finds necessary. Introduced text; House substitute.
The adopted Dean House amendment narrowed the fee provisions to the HMO/preferred-provider chapters and temporarily added a condition making implementation mandatory only with a specific appropriation. A Goodwin/J. González amendment to separately disclose executive compensation in administrative-expense estimates failed; it is not a requirement of the enacted law. The Senate substitute restored the express benefit-plan and Medicaid-only-issuer fee exemptions. Dean amendment; failed compensation proposal; amendment history; all versions.
Bettencourt’s adopted Senate amendment added the covered-lives fee formula, annual March 1 cost/enrollment submissions and startup procedures. It made comptroller rulemaking optional and removed both the rulemaking deadline and the House’s specific-appropriation implementation condition. The House concurred; those Senate changes are in the final law. Senate amendment; amendment index.
For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.
Official bill versions
Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.
Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?
Potential benefits: lawmakers and the public gain a common evidence base for weighing coverage, health outcomes and financial consequences. Clear uncertainty statements and public methods can help readers judge the analysis. Reports do not guarantee lower premiums, better health or passage of a proposal.
Costs and burdens: affected issuers fund the program and provide data; the center and insurance officials must meet short reporting deadlines. Insurers could seek to recover costs through their business pricing, but the law and fiscal note do not establish a specific premium increase. Individual insurer responses remain confidential even though combined results are public.
Fiscal estimate: the latest May 22 note shows $3.938 million in costs and matching fee revenue in fiscal 2026, followed by $2.057 million each in fiscal 2027, producing a projected $0 net general-revenue-related impact. It assumes two assessments in fiscal 2026 and six additional state positions across the center and comptroller. That is fee-supported spending, not a cost-free program. The note also flags an unquantified Health and Human Services Commission impact; no local-government impact is anticipated. HB138 itself makes no appropriation. Latest fiscal note.
Important source distinction: that fiscal note still repeats the specific-appropriation implementation condition, although the adopted Senate amendment removed it and the enrolled law omits it. The explanation uses the enacted text for legal duties and labels the note’s dollars as estimates; it does not carry that stale condition into the law.
Review boundary: checked history, every bill version, all three indexed amendment texts and their outcomes, the complete Senate packet, all six listed fiscal-note versions and the fee/existing-database references. This is not an audit of current program operations, fee collections, individual reports or subsequent appropriations.
Official sources
- Bill history and latest recorded action
- Bill versions, analyses and fiscal notes
- Action history and votes
- Amendment index
Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.