Heather Bagnall
Delegate, District 33C
By Heather Bagnall
Every year, the May issue of the Voice is always a challenging one. With over 2,600 bills introduced and over 900 passed during the session, the same question always looms: What should be the focus? Should I talk about the budget, which despite an immensely difficult time with a looming structural deficit, deficiencies due to aging infrastructure, job losses due to the firing of federal workers, and great uncertainty from Washington, passed balanced, early and delivered key investments in education, health care, transportation and child care? The budget also reined in and created greater oversight of spending and ensures the long-term sustainability of our programs for our most vulnerable Marylanders.
How about the work we did to lower utility costs and to hold CEOs accountable first and foremost to their ratepayers, rather than their shareholders, to ramp up energy generation?
There’s also the work to protect the rights of our immigrant communities, our black and brown communities, and our LGBTQ communities, our neighbors, who find themselves under an all-out assault from a hostile administration who seem to have forgotten that the constitutional rights of freedom of speech, assembly, religion and due process are guaranteed to all.
This session saw a historic election of our new speaker, Joseline Peña-Melnyk, and my appointment as the chair of the newly configured House Health Committee. As chair I helped shepherd legislation addressing long-standing disparities in the management of menopause and perimenopause; raising the standards and increasing the quality of our assisted living facilities and nursing homes; addressing pediatric overstays in hospitals while ending the practice of boarding adolescents in unlicensed settings; overhauling our broken foster care system; modernizing our antiquated health department technology infrastructure; and reforming our public health system to ensure better communication, coordination, training, and professional development between our local health authorities and the state department of health.
We protected our most vulnerable communities, ensured continued access to Medicaid, expanded our behavioral health system coordination, codified federal protections for pregnancy-related emergencies and behavioral health parity into state law, and ensured that recommendations for vaccinations and preventive services would be based on science, not politics.
We passed legislation to address our long emergency department wait times and ensure workers who have a front seat to the challenges have a seat at the table in creating solutions, and we continued our work on addressing our maternal mortality and morbidity rates with legislation that ensures moms and babies are getting the care they need not only in the essential first 48 hours but throughout that first essential year.
We passed the Commission on Re-Imagining Health Care in Maryland – an initiative to consider not what is but what could be – to ensure patient-centered, outcomes-driven, quality health care for every Marylander. Where others saw uncertainty, we saw opportunity. I believe that may have been my biggest contribution – not the bills I passed or the meetings I held but my insistence on approaching this work with pragmatism and hope.
Eight years ago, I ran to put our district on the map because I felt we were underrepresented, under-resourced and underestimated. Eight years later we have a tremendous advocate, friend and one of the most effective senators in the chamber. We’ve established great relationships with our local and state agencies, with our community organizations and local chambers, and our first-ever chair of a House Standing Committee. Though the session has come to an end, the work is far from over, but we all should celebrate that even in the most challenging of times, we put our heads down, do the work, and turn challenges into opportunities.