[GailA]

Spendquist keeps saying that removing these folks who are ILLEGALLY on TennCare will only save $100M. Gee we are now told it would cost $300M to put them back on..for just SIX MONTHS.

[tdadams]

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said the state does not have to comply immediately with that order by U.S. District Judge William J. Haynes Jr., who ruled that enrollees were illegally removed from the managed-care program for the poor lazy, disabled criminal, and uninsured unqualified.

It's reassuring to see a court issue a sensible opinion that respects the law. Haynes' order was simply legislation from the bench. It was his opinion that paring the TennCare rolls would create an "undue hardship" notwithstanding that his opinion was in direct contradiction with what a duly elected legislature authorized as a matter of state law.

[hoot2]

"Nearly 200,000 TennCare enrollees who were removed from the program by the state, only to be ordered back in by a federal judge, are out again. "

c'mon; just do what the demonRATS in kalifornica do...
RAISE TAXES... problem solved, next?

[usmom]

Here in Wisconsin we have 'BadgerCare' which is another socialist farce. People come in for prescriptions and flash that card like it was a Platinum Visa and announce 'that should all be paid for'! Meanwhile, they drive up in their new Tahoes and chat on their new cell phones. I have had a mother refuse to pay $1 for a $100 antibiotic (while talking on her new cell phone) because she would rather just have her daughter end up in the hospital and have the state pay for the whole thing. We are also supposed to waive the $1 fee if the person claims they don't have enough money. Lo and behold, they go shopping for trinkets, come back to the pharmacy with their bag and tell you they don't have a dollar to pay for their medication. Sorry bunch of lazy, irresponsible, shameless losers every last one of 'em!

[Grammy]

One of the problems here is that they are dropping people who should be on Tenncare, and leaving many of the illegal ones. It's the shell game they played before, to try to get an income tax passed. You know, close the state parks, and don't really cut out any of the waste. When people scream about it they will say "Income tax"!

[tnlibertarian]

200,000 down, 1.23 million to go. For anyone wondering, 1.43 million is about 25% of the population of the State.

[DannyTN]

The Tenncare system is corrupt. The solution is to reinstate Medicaid. It worked much better.

The privately run MCO's (Managed Care Organizations) that were contracted to manage the benefits rewarded their founders with multi-million dollar parachutes and then went bankrupt leaving care providers unpaid and causing many of them to bankrupt as well.

Since the MCO's were paid a flat fee per person they signed up 50,000 people from bordering states who didn't even live in Tennessee. The only requirement was that they have a post office box in Tennessee.

Hopefully most of the people cut were these people. But I do not doubt that they probably cut some people who shouldn't have been cut. The answer is that they need an expedited review process to reinstate these people. (Expedited and TN government are mutually exclusive except for the Nashville Clerk of Court who seems to be have a very efficient auto tag process.)

Simultaneously with the enrollment cuts, certain benefits have been cut. The media has found several cases of people who are going to die, if the benefit cuts go through. And some of these people are literally wards of the state. The TN Justice Center is suing Tennessee on behalf of these people to get their benefits reinstated.

They have not thought through the TennCare system. They installed it without any independant controls or oversight.
And in the process, the politicians have made their friends wealthy and eliminated much competition in the healthcare field.