An impossible task. That’s what Randy Fritz was faced with in the summer of 1999.
As executive assistant to then-Texas Health Commissioner William “Reyn” Archer III, Fritz had 10 months to create from scratch a new statewide health insurance program for poor kids who did not qualify for Medicaid.
Why the rush? There was public pressure to get the program rolling after a recalcitrant Texas Legislature had been slow to adopt what leadership Republicans regarded as an entitlement.
But underlining the urgency was the fact that Gov. George W. Bush had recently announced his candidacy for president — and his allies on both sides of the aisle in the Legislature knew that a successful program would give him a boost if he made it through the primaries to become the Republican nominee, Fritz said.
At the time, the massive Texas Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, existed only on paper, the Legislature having just passed it weeks earlier as the state version of a 1997 federal program.
These kinds of programs can take years to create and build up, but Fritz and his counterpart at the agency, Texas Health and Human Services Commission, had to get it off the ground by spring 2000 and deliver gangbuster enrollment numbers in a few months, Fritz recalled.
Source: How Texas prioritized children’s state health care 25 years ago / The Texas Tribune