House Speaker John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi negotiated and passed a bipartisan $200 billion Medicare 'doc fix' and health programing bill, which altered the procedure for reimbursing doctors under Medicare.

That bill quietly increased funding for abstinence-only programs. However, ignorance bred in abstinence-only education could have contributed to the chlamydia outbreak among students in an abstinence-only West Texas high school.

The Crane Independent School District has confirmed 20 cases of the sexually transmitted disease known as chlamydia. The school's population is about 300, and roughly 1 in 15 students have STIs. The outbreak was severe enough that the district sent letters home to parents last week.

The school's 2014-2015 handbook, Crane ISD, "does not offer a curriculum in human sexuality," but the handbook does itemize state-mandated stipulations for the future, including devoting attention to abstinence, encouraging abstinence from sexual activity, directing adolescents to a standard of behavior in which abstinence from sexual activity before marriage is the most effecting way to prevent pregnancy and STIs, and discuss contraception and condom use in terms of human use reality rates instead of theoretical laboratory rates. In terms of the school's sex-ed program, the students are offered three days of abstinence-only advocacy each fall.

"We do have an abstinence curriculum, and that evidently ain't working," Jim Rumage, superintendent for the Crane Independent School District, told KFOR-TV about the outbreak at Crane High School. "We need to do all we can, although it's the parents' responsibility to educate their kids on sexual education."

In defense of the school's sex education program, Rumage also told the San Antonio Express-News, "If kids are not having any sexual activity, they can't get this disease. ... That's not a bad program."

Crane's health advisory committee recently met to examine the outbreak and to prepare a response, which will be presented to the school board on May 19. They'll discuss and vote on possibly changing the sex-ed teachings.

More than 60 percent (60.1 percent) of the county's population is Hispanic/Latino.

Aside from abstinence education, the bipartisan bill funds have been allotted for diabetes research, rural hospitals and schools and training health professionals who serve in low-income areas.

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