Lois Kolkhorst Is Killing Texas Women. Here's How To Stop Her.
Texas maternal mortality nearly doubled on her watch. She was too busy waving her notebook to notice.
I haven’t been keeping up with all of the legislative interim hearings happening in Austin. One, I figured I could get to them later since the Legislature won’t meet again until January. And two, I don’t expect Republicans to hold the Texas House in November (fingers crossed).
However, I did sit down to watch the Senate interim hearing on healthcare costs in Texas. And besides the fact that Republicans are blatantly ignorant about how to run a government and government solutions, the GOP Committee members wasted no time letting their depraved and malevolent positions be known. Particularly, Senator Lois Kolkhorst.
Committee Chair Lois Kolkhorst opened the hearing by doing her best impression of someone who gives a damn about healthcare costs. And honestly? Some of what she said wasn’t wrong. PBMs are a black box. Hospital pricing is deliberately opaque. The system is rigged against regular people. Fine. True.
But here’s the thing, Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee for years. She controls nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending. She showed up to this hearing waving around a notebook full of every healthcare bill she’s carried over the years, lamenting that nothing ever changed.
That notebook is her record, her failure. She built that notebook.
She’s performing outrage at a fire she’s been feeding for a decade.
And then there’s the vaccine thing. While she’s been chairing the most powerful health committee in Texas, she’s been platforming Robert Malone and Peter McCullough (documented peddlers of vaccine misinformation) in her own committee hearings.
Lois Kolkhorst spent years undermining public health infrastructure in this state.
Kolkhorst co-sponsored making Ivermectin an over-the-counter drug.
And she co-sponsored a bill that blocks doctors from refusing organ donations from unvaccinated patients.
She voted against allowing general contractors to be eligible for workers’ compensation.
Healthcare costs are substantially driven by preventable illness. You cannot spend your tenure as the state’s top health legislator sowing distrust in medicine and then cosplay as a crusader against rising healthcare costs. Those two things are not compatible.
And when she finally gets around to solutions? Health savings accounts. Flexible plans. That’s not bending the cost curve. That’s handing sick people a coupon and telling them good luck.
Oh, and she sat through this entire hearing dripping in diamonds and gold. Just so you know who she’s fighting for.
But let’s talk about what Lois Kolkhorst has actually done to Texas women’s health, because this is where it stops being ironic and starts being deadly.
In 2011, Kolkhorst voted to slash family planning funding in Texas by 66%.
82 family planning clinics across the state were forced to close. These weren’t just abortion providers. They were the entry point into the healthcare system for millions of Texas women. Cancer screenings. Birth control. STD testing. Gone.
What happened next was not subtle.
Texas maternal mortality rate went from 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 38.7 in 2012. It nearly doubled in two years. Researchers published those findings in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology and described the spike as difficult to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval.” No other state in the country saw anything close to it. Texas maternal mortality reached, in their words, “levels not seen in other U.S. states.”
Black women bore the worst of it, accounting for 11% of Texas births but nearly 29% of pregnancy-related deaths.
Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee throughout its time.
Lois Kolkhorst is someone who had the power to protect Texas women, chose not to, and hundreds of Black and brown mothers died. That blood is on her hands. Directly. Unmistakably. Hers.
She didn’t just watch this happen. She had the gavel. She controlled the committee that oversees the agencies responsible for maternal health in this state. And when the data came out, the Legislature “mostly punted.”
So when Lois Kolkhorst sits at the head of that committee table in her gold and diamonds, waving her notebook and asking why healthcare costs keep rising, understand what you’re looking at. You’re looking at someone who made Texas one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to have a baby, and is now performing concerned about the bill.
And it’s not just women Kolkhorst has failed.
At another hearing last year, a behavioral health physician sat before her committee and laid it out in plain language. Private psychiatric care costs $50,000 a month. There’s a 540-bed waitlist. The healthcare system has no financial incentive to build out mental health infrastructure because there are no profit margins. And then he said that suicide rates are going to hit levels we’ve never seen before because there is simply nowhere for kids to go.
Kolkhorst’s response was to talk about her whiteboard, her DOGE project with Senator Nichols, and to tell everyone to take a deep breath because the Trump administration is being confirmed as we speak, and everything is going to be okay. Fast-forward to Summer 2026, it’s not okay.
A doctor just told her that her children are going to die. She responded with “Trump is my daddy.”
She’s not confused about how the system works. She just doesn’t care.
Which brings us to how any of this is even possible. How does someone with this record end up chairing the most powerful health committee in the Texas Senate?
Dan Patrick put her there.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has reappointed Lois Kolkhorst as Chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee after session after session, handing her control of nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending and oversight of every health agency in Texas. This is the same Dan Patrick who, during COVID, said that grandparents should be willing to die to protect the economy. The same Dan Patrick who has spent his entire career in Texas politics burning institutions down and calling it conservatism.
Kolkhorst is Dan Patrick’s instrument. Every failed bill, every gutted clinic, every Black mother who died, that’s a policy choice that Patrick blessed, session after session, by putting her name on that committee gavel.
When you’re trying to understand how Texas healthcare got this broken, you don’t just look at Kolkhorst. You look at who keeps rewarding her for breaking it.
And in November, her seat (SD18) is on the ballot.
Senate District 18 stretches across 19 counties, from Fort Bend to Victoria to the rural Hispanic counties along the coast. Democrat Erica Gillum is running against her. And before anyone says it’s not flippable, understand what the political environment looks like right now. Beef is nearly $10 a pound. Gas is $4 a gallon. Taylor Rehmet just flipped a Texas Senate seat that Trump won by 17 points. The wave is real and building.
But waves don’t flip seats by themselves. Here’s what actually has to happen:
Fort Bend turnout has to be massive. 45% of SD18 live in Fort Bend County, the majority non-Anglo, heavily Asian American and Black, and trending hard blue. Gillum needs to run 10+ points better than Allred’s 2024 numbers there. That means real GOTV infrastructure on the ground.
Hispanic counties have to move. Gonzales, Calhoun, Victoria, and Refugio, all majority or near-majority Hispanic voting age population, all historically underperforming. If the economic environment is genuinely moving Hispanic voters left, these are the counties where it shows up in SD18. Without movement here, the math doesn’t work. Period.
Waller County has to be worked. 73% of Waller County lies within this district. 28% Black population. It has been left on the table in every past cycle. A coordinated campaign has to actually show up there this time.
Someone has to make Kolkhorst spend her $3.1 million. A major outside group has to get into this race. Erica Gillum cannot win an air war she’s not fighting. Kolkhorst sitting on that war chest unopposed is a death sentence for this campaign.
Gillum’s campaign has to wake up.
Right now. The clock is not her friend. She needs her name to be known in Fort Bend’s Asian-American and Black communities. She needs to be in Victoria and Gonzales. She needs to raise money, as the race depends on it. A candidate who isn’t generating energy in her own base counties loses this race, no matter how good the environment is statewide.
The national environment has to hold through November. Special elections run on Democratic enthusiasm and Republican complacency. November general elections don’t. Full Republican turnout changes the math. The wave has to be still cresting when polls close.
All six of those things have to happen. Missing any one of them probably kills it.
But here’s why it matters beyond the electoral math. Lois Kolkhorst is not just a bad politician. She is someone who has used two decades of political power to make Texas a more dangerous place to be poor, to be a woman, to be Black or brown, and to be sick.
Women died because of her votes.
Children are going without mental healthcare because she responded to a doctor’s warning with a Trump talking point.
And she’s going to keep doing it for as long as she holds that gavel.
Erica Gillum needs your help. She needs donations. She needs volunteers. She needs every Democrat in SD18 to treat this race like it’s the most important one on the ballot, because for the women of Texas, it might be.
Lois Kolkhorst has been killing Texas women with policy for two decades. November is the chance to make her stop.
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Gloves off!💪🤛
These people are just soulless ghouls. Democrats need to treat Kolkhorst, Patrick, et. al. not just as political opponents but as the moral and ethical antithesis of being an American and a real human being.