That's over $4,100 per "poor and uninsured" person. Just for INSURANCE!
Whether they ever see a doctor or don't!
Is the $5.8 Billion dollar figure the annual cost? (Gulp!)
Noticed that myself. That's AT LEAST $2 billion more per year than what a private company would do it for.
by Steve Gill
Steve Gill is the morning radio talk host on Nashville’s Supertalk 99.7 WTN.
For the last several years, taxpayers have been assured that the cause of the state’s financial woes has nothing to do with the spending side of the equation. “An insufficient and inelastic” revenue stream has regularly been blamed as the culprit in the state’s financial mess.
TennCare, the state’s massive health care system that was modeled after Hillary Clinton’s view of health care, “is not the problem” we have been told. But even a cursory review of TennCare, and its impact on the budget, reveals that it is indeed the culprit in Tennessee’s recent spending spree.
In TennCare’s first year of operation, fiscal year 1994, the cost of the program was $2.73 billion. For fiscal year 2001-02, according to the fact book issued by the Senate and House Finance, Ways and Means Committees, TennCare will cost the taxpayers more than $5.8 billion - an increase of well over 100 percent since its inception.
One of the reasons that spending on TennCare has increased so dramatically is the fact that so many people who are not legally eligible for its benefits continue to receive taxpayer-subsidized health care. In January 2000, TennCare’s acting director disclosed that after checking the eligibility of 41,470 of the non-Medicaid TennCare enrollees, 20 percent were ineligible. Some estimates of the number of those not eligible due to residency, access to employer health plans or other factors may actually run higher than 30 percent. In other words, more than 150,000 people may be receiving taxpayer-funded health benefits to which they are not entitled at a cost of more than $200 million a year, yet no serious effort has been undertaken to ferret out the fraud, waste and abuse in TennCare.
In fact, the state cannot even reveal how many people on TennCare have no address in Tennessee other than a post office box - a number which might indicate the extent to which people outside of Tennessee are committing fraud by simply using a bogus address.
Likewise, hundreds of thousands of others are receiving TennCare benefits who do not meet income standards. 1999 Census Bureau data indicates that Tennessee had a poverty rate of 12.7 percent. With a total state population of about 5.4 million, and with adjustments for Medicaid income eligibility, there should be about 825,000 Tennesseans qualified for health care assistance. Yet, according to the TennCare Bureau, about 1.19 million people are on TennCare due to being below the poverty level.
Apparently, about 300,000 people are under-reporting their income in order to receive some of the best health care in the country - for free or nearly free - yet Tennessee has not prosecuted a single person for misrepresenting their income level when enrolling in TennCare.
Finally, the fraud that is apparently epidemic in the mismanaged TennCare program is best highlighted in prescriptions, where Tennessee ranks No. 1 in the country with the highest per capita prescription usage - 40 percent above the national average! And TennCare usage is even more out of control - more than 87 percent higher than the national average! Something is seriously wrong in terms of cost, fraud and health risks from mixing so many drugs, yet nothing has been done.
The truth is that TennCare is an abysmal mess and the state’s budget problems will never be fixed until the problems that plague TennCare are addressed. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of dollars are slipping through the cracks that could better be spent on improving our schools, revitalizing our urban and rural areas and improving the quality of life in Tennessee. The sooner we face up to the challenge of fixing or scrapping TennCare, the sooner taxpayers will have relief from the unrelenting assault on our wallets.