Highlights from our interview with John Hryhorchuk, Senior Vice President of Policy and Advocacy for Texas 2036.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What does your organization, Texas 2036, work on and what policies are you focused on?
A: John Hryhorchuk
Texas 2036 uses data to identify the most pressing challenges that face our state, as well as the most promising solutions to address those challenges, with the goal of continuing our state’s prosperity to our bicentennial in 2036 and beyond.
I think a lot about this concept of the Texas Miracle and people thinking about it as though it’s fleeting. And I think we need to have Texans have a much bolder concept of the idea that it’s not just a miracle, but we’ve earned this and we can continue putting the policies in place to drive our prosperity throughout the century.
It’s important that we do both the short-term and long-term. The immediate problems of the day are worth addressing and deserve attention. But, it shouldn’t come at the expense of planning for the state that we want for our kids and grandkids. And, sometimes that means putting in place policies that really won’t show their full benefit for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years. When we talk about major investments in water infrastructure, for example, doing those kinds of things, we’re talking about generational horizons. But if we don’t take those actions today, we’re in a difficult position twenty years from now.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What are some of the issues you are seeing in the data when it comes to health care in Texas?
A: John Hryhorchuk
One of the things we think about in terms of health care costs generally is that a lot of solutions that involve the government are a balloon squeeze. It’s shifting costs from one entity to another. And that’s a common solution. We think that we need to, rather, empower the markets to be what we call healthy markets, that are transparent.
There’s been a lot of incredible work on health care price transparency in recent years. But we also need to empower consumers of health care to be able to act, to engage on that data so that they can make informed choices so they get the care they need at a price they can afford.
One thing that really scares us in the data is the number of Texans, including those with health insurance, that skip care due to the cost. That is one of the leading metrics that we track because it’s just so concerning. And, we as a state, have a high uninsured rate. We have the highest uninsured rate of any state in the country. And there are solutions available to help solve some of that. But when even Texans with insurance are skipping care because they can’t afford it, the alarm bells are going off.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What can the state do to address children’s mental health issues?
A: John Hryhorchuk
There’s certainly a lot of concerns that have surfaced in recent years about children’s mental health. And it’s not just mental health specifically, but the impact of the pandemic on education and learning and classroom behavior and discipline and all those things. It all feeds into this generalized need to focus on and invest in our children to get them back where they need to be in our schools and outside of them as well.
Our state has made some really good investments in that regard. I think there’s going to be a significant discourse this upcoming session about the role of cell phones and social media in our classrooms and how that impacts mental health. So, I think there’s a robust public discussion going on as we try to course correct some of the issues that have been trending negatively in recent years.
On the impacts of cell phones on mental health, we don’t have any proprietary data on that. We are consumers of the same stuff that everybody has been reading in that regard. But it is an area that is certainly worthy of attention.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What does Texas need to do to ensure the state’s long-term water needs are met?
A: John Hryhorchuk
It is an area that every Texan should be thinking about and every legislature should be preparing to invest in because we are blessed as a state to have big economic growth, lots of folks moving here. Our population is growing. At the same time, we have state projections in terms of water needs that are significant.
We are going to be releasing a study later this fall that gets into how much money the state will need to spend to meet its long term water needs over the next 30 to 50 years. And these numbers are significant in 2024 costs. Who knows what that’ll cost in 2070. But in 2024 cost, it’s about $150 billion in investment that’s necessary for supply, wastewater infrastructure, fixing the aging, depreciating pipes, all that kind of stuff as a statewide effort.
Last session the legislature did a great thing. And, when you went and voted on the constitutional amendments last time, you had the opportunity to vote for Prop 6, which gave $1 billion and created the Texas Water Fund. That water fund is divided up into both creating new supply as well as fixing some of the existing failing infrastructure. But that’s one billion towards what we see as a $150 billion challenge. We have a state financing mechanism. It’s not like we need to go out and write a $150 billion check today. But the gap in terms of what is currently in the hopper and how big we need to go is more than $100 billion away from where we need to be.
John Hryhorchuk is the Senior Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Texas 2036, a non-partisan, data driven public policy think tank here in Austin, Texas. John previously worked as the Deputy Director of Budget and Policy for Governor Greg Abbott, and he joins us here today.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Listen to the full discussion here.
