Proposed Public Health Legislation

Health care legislations in the US have lately become a controversial subject to discuss. This can be understood given the impact it is likely to cause in the country’s health care sector. For instance, the proposal in Texas to have citizens go through blood screening as a routine exercise to check AIDS prevalence will obviously meet lots of resistance from residence. This is an indicator that there will still be a lot of debate on this legislation before the law is agreed on (Ackerman 2010).

The bill, which was based on recommendations made to the Center for Disease control and Prevention, in 2006 has some logic because it is meant to tract down on the extent of spread amongst citizens. When viewed this way, it will be easy to convince law makers and the population in general on the positive site of these health care laws.

I agree with several sections of the proposed legislation, but there are parts that require more scrutiny. The Human Resource Code for instance prohibits payments made to providers or programs that perform elective abortion. This can also be a cause for alarm because funding for important health care facilities can easily be stopped upon suspicion that they are engaged in this nature of abortions. The Medicaid Women’s Health Care Program is likely to be affected with this kind of legislation. The modality of stopping funds to a medical facility needs to be open and enough evidence gathered before such measure is taken.

The Health and Human Services Commission should be allowed to study the legislative proposal and collect more views from citizens before being adopted or passed. Public awareness on the possible repercussions of the health care legislation needs to be done. For example, the current statistics on the number of people living with HIV and aware of this proposal is very low. About a quarter of those already infected are still unaware of this possibility. Legislators and policy makers should take time to examine the various aspects of the law, raise the public awareness and educate citizens on the impact of each section of the health care legislation. This is the only way it can be agreed by the majority (Ackerman 2010).