With just three weeks left in the 2021 Maryland General Assembly session, there is positive momentum on many of MHA’s priorities to expand health care access and bolster health equity.

MHA and your government affairs leads have been hard at work leading up to Crossover Day—the procedural deadline when a bill needs to pass one chamber, the House of Delegates or the Senate, and cross over to the other chamber to remain viable. Measures to establish Health Equity Resource Communities, enshrine telehealth access, mandate implicit bias training, establish a commission on health equity, and more all are poised to move forward.

While MHA led these major efforts to advance health care in our state, our strategy focuses on partnerships and collective voices.

Hearings continue next week to work out differences in the bills, but we are seeing broad support for bills MHA put forth and those launched by others that we support.

We continue to fight proposed legislation that would impede your ability to care for your communities. Significant challenges are posed by bills impacting the way you work with patients through the financial assistance and billing processes and by legislation that would institute essential worker mandates. MHA will stay closely engaged on these bills until Sine Die.

This is a difficult legislative session, logistically and politically. Yet we hope to secure wins on several field priorities to strengthen health and health care in Maryland for the long term.

Bob Atlas
President & CEO