Posted on 03/22/2010 8:58:33 PM PDT by Tennessean4Bush
Watch the video at the link above or here.
So says the guy that still won’t admit voting for TARP was a bad idea, and that has said he will argue the point with anyone...
Anyone know if the TN AG is a Repub and if they are joining the lawsuits against this nightmare?
I did not agree with TARP either, but conservatives whom I respect and normally agree with have honest disagreements on it. I don’t concede the point, and think they are wrong. But Zach is right about healthcare, taxes, spending, debt, 10th amendment. He is a fabulous communicator, and will make a great Governor.
Bredesen democrat gov says obamacare will hurt tennessee
The AG is Robert E. Cooper, Jr., and he is a Bredeson appointee, I think. Bredeson despises this bill, so I would not be surprised.
The people of TN need to start calling the gov or AG and make sure they are in the lawsuits.
doesnt tennessee already have some sort of govt healthcare like romneycare called ‘tenncare’ ?
Thought I would go ahead and post this:
Lessons For Health Care Reform
By Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Phil Roe
Tennessee was home to a failed attempt at universal single payer care, and has lessons to teach a President who has promised that in pursuing his goal of universal health care, he will learn from the policy failures of the past. In 1994 Tennessee implemented managed care in its Medicaid program, creating a system known as TennCare. The objective was to use the anticipated savings from Medicaid to fund and expand coverage for children and the uninsured. The result was a program that nearly bankrupted the state, reduced the quality of care, and collapsed under its own weight.
The genesis of TennCare has many parallels to the situation in which we find ourselves today. It was a public option plan designed to save money and expand coverage. In the early 1990s, Tennessee was facing rising costs in its Medicaid program. TennCare was designed to replace Mediaid with managed care and use the promised savings to expand coverage. By 1998, TennCare swelled to cover 1.2 million people. Private business dropped coverage for employees and forced them onto state rolls. By 2002 enrollment had swelled to 1.4 million people and forced Tennessee’s Governor to raise taxes and ultimately propose an entirely new state income tax to cover the unforeseen costs. Governor Bredesen was ultimately forced to dramatically restructure a program he has since called “a disaster”. By 2006 Bredesen had disenrolled nearly 200,000 people and slashed benefits.
TennCare lessons challenge the Administration’s thinking on the benefits of a “public option” solution to assuring American’s have the care they deserve. As a Tennessee doctor who provided care under TennCare and a state legislator who had to find ways for the state to pay for it, we learned these lessons the hard way. They shaped the way we both approach health care policy. With Democrats promising to pass a similar system in the House by August, those lessons are worth sharing with the country now.
“Free” Care Is Expensive: No matter how forthright the Administration’s cost estimates are; no model accounts for the rational decisions that push people to over-utilize the “free care” a public option offers. TennCare’s gold plated coverage included every doctor’s appointment and prescription. As such, patients with a cold opted to charge the state hundreds of dollars for doctor visits and medicine instead of paying $5 out of pocket for over-the-counter cold medicine. Over-use caused TennCare’s anticipated savings to evaporate and its cost to explode. While TennCare consistently covered between 1.2 and 1.4 million people; costs increased from $2.5 billion in 1995 to $8 billion by the time of TennCare’s restructuring. It consumed a third of the state budget including nearly all state revenue growth. When the illusion of “free” care is fostered, it is always over-utilized.
Employers Prefer “Free” Care to Private Care: If the government offers universal health care, why wouldn’t businesses move employees to the plan as a sound business decision? In Tennessee, this behavior dramatically expanded the public burden as people who had once been on private insurance migrated to the “free” option of public care, adding to the State’s unanticipated cost. Studies indicate that only 55% of those added to TennCare came from the uninsured population, while the rest came from a decline in private coverage.
There Is a Difference Between Access To Care and Availability Of Care: Government-run health care advocates must overpromise on benefits to gain support for their plan, only to renege on those promises when the bill comes due. It’s a classic bait-and-switch. To pay the TennCare bill, benefits were slashed and reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals were reduced. Ultimately, 170,000 people were cut from the program. Since they weren’t being paid; fewer physicians could afford to accept TennCare patients. So while a TennCare card guaranteed you access to care, it did not guarantee the availability of care.
Government Control Puts More People In The Exam Room Than Just You And Your Doctor: Because government health care can only provide what it can afford, a determination of cost-effective care becomes more important than doctor-recommended care. Doctors become intermediaries between the government and patients, only able to offer suggestions on treatment. Tennessee physicians often spent more time arguing with government bureaucrats over care than they did providing it to their patients. Other actors soon inserted themselves into the process, including trial lawyers and advocacy groups who stepped in to sue the state. Efforts to rationalize the program, pay doctors, and heal the sick became frustrated by repeated consent decrees and lawsuits that turned the system into a bureaucratic morass that itself could not be healed.
The President’s new health care czar was a critical link in the TennCare story. Serving as Human Services Commissioner in Tennessee and then as a key health staffer in the Clinton Administration, Nancy DeParle should be well aware of Tennessee’s health care saga. We hope that she lists the kind of universal care that TennCare embodied in the “don’t try again” column.
We want to provide access to affordable basic health care for all Americans, and we’re actively seeking a solution to do this. But creating a plan like TennCare is not the right answer. We understand the magnitude of the task ahead and we are dedicated to this debate and seeing reform come to our health care system.
[Blackburn and Roe are Republicans representing Tennessee in the House of Representatives]
BTW: TennCare has now limited the number of visits a patient can get per year ...
The AG in Tennessee is appointed by the State Supreme Court.
As Milton Friedman once observed: "If there isn't any, no one gets any."
The Attorney General is appointed by the left-wing state Supreme Court.
IMHO, TN, should bring up suit.
Good post bump.
So far, Wamp is the leading candidate on my vote for Governor. I was ready to vote for him after reading about his views on gun rights in a comparitive article in The Commercial Appeal months ago. There was one other guy that impressed me on that issue but I’ll have to see what his views are on other issues, as well. About all the rest were either Commies, liberals or RINOS who wanted the Republican nomination but believed most citizens were in desperate need of babysitting...namely Shelby County DA Bill Gibbons. I don’t even know how he can call himself a conservative unless he’s comparing himself to the Memphis Democrat machine.
Friend, that article needs to be posted as a new thread to the forum. If you have a link back to the original source, please post this immediately.
I’d also very much like to copy this into an email and send it out far and wide to my list of serial forwarders. It would go viral.
Let me know about that link, would you? Thanks.
Didn’t Phil Bredesen finally dump Tenncare and go back to plain old Medicaid?
It should be sent to TV news stations and newspapers, too, as these media morons attempt to try to explain the deathcare bill to the fat, dumb populace and what it will do for them.
I am hoping this November will see a flood of new GOP strength in every state. It is possible, with the level of discontent now, that the GOP could sweep the elections in TN and wipe out the liberals for a generation.
Surely you jest. It'll never see the light of day. No, the TennCare story contains way too much fact and empirical evidence to pass the media filters.
This is the sort of thing that the new media has to get out there, and that includes viral email.
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