Health And Human Resources Subcommittee

Friday, January 30, 2026·39m·▶ Watch / Listen

The House Appropriations Health and Human Resources Subcommittee gently tabled three bills — on childhood literacy, sickle cell disease, and sudden unexpected infant death in epilepsy — each by a unanimous 7-0 vote, citing resource constraints and competing budget pressures, while receiving a detailed briefing on accelerating Children's Services Act expenditures and proposed cost-containment measures in the introduced budget.

Key Actions

·Children's Services Act (CSA) – Budget BriefingNo Vote

Controversies

Use of CSA funding for public separate schools for special education

Committee member Kathy K.L. Tran raised the idea of piloting public day schools for special education given the large cost of private day placements, while Scott Reiner pushed back, expressing concern that such programs could cause net widening — that students already in private day could not be returned to public school without parental consent and that new separate public programs might expand the CSA population rather than reduce it. Reiner stated his personal view that if those programs make sense they should be done through the Department of Education, not funded through CSA.

+ 1 more controversy

Notable Quotes

“Not only does Reach out and Read program promote child literacy, has been shown to improve children's attendance at their well child visits to make sure that we can identify developmental delays early and get them referred over to the appropriate medical resources. And furthermore, it keeps our children on track as it oftentimes improves their language acquisition by up to three to six months.”
Mark D. Downey — Downey, the bill patron and a practicing pediatrician, was making the case for expanding the Reach Out and Read program to underserved communities through a Medicaid budget amendment.

+ 3 more quotes

Votes

To gently lay HB 525 on the tablePassed

To gently lay HB 136 on the tablePassed

To gently lay HB 376 on the tablePassed

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TranscriptPreview

Good afternoon. Welcome. We're convening the House Appropriations Health and Human Resources Subcommittee. I'm your chair, Delegate Rodney Willett. And thank you for being with us. It's been a pretty busy Friday afternoon for Appropriations, a lot of meetings. And what we're going to do, we actually have a couple of bills I think we can get through pretty quickly and then we're going to have a presentation on csa. So let's go ahead and do the bills first because I think we can get them taken care of in a matter of minutes here. And I'm going to since he's in the room, there's a doctor in the House and we're going to have Delegate Mark Downey join us to talk about his bill, which is HB 525. Oh, and I forgot the roll. I got so excited. I got so excited. We were rolling without the roll. So if we can get the roll, that would be great. Thank. Okay, we've got a quorum here. Thank you, Dr. Downey. Now we're with you, delegate. Dr. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I'm pleased today to present House Bill 525, the Reach out and…

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