October 3, 2006

Another Broken Promise

Four years ago, Tennessee voters narrowly elected Phil Bredesen governor instead of his Republican opponent primarily because the former Nashville mayor had been a successful healthcare business executive, and the state's financial crisis was largely caused by TennCare, the state's budget-busting, out-of-control healthcare program. Today's Tennessean reports that, under Bredesen's leadership, the state's TennCare/healthcare costs are still rising faster than promised, while fewer people have healthcare coverage.

Which is what we should have expected given that Bredesen once ran HMOs.

Today, Bredesen is running for re-election claiming to have tamed TennCare and solved the state's budget problems - but the numbers tell a different tale. The numbers show that Bredesen's decision to toss a few hundred thousand sick, elderly, disabled and poor people off the program rather than enact meaningful reforms hasn't solved the state's healthcare budget crisis, merely shifted the numbers around.

When you think about it, that was entirely predictable. Bredesen wasn't actually a healthcare executive - he never ran a company that took care of sick people. He got fabulously wealthy by owning and running HMOs - "health maintenance organizations" - which were really about maintaining the bottom line for the owners, not about maintaining the health of the members.

HMOs made money by taking in members' premiums, and spending less of it to reimburse doctors and hospitals for the medical care they provided the HMO's members. The less medical care the HMO paid for, the more money Phil Bredesen made.

His estimated net worth is around $200 million.

He used some of it to get into politics, first trying to buy his way into Congress, then spending millions to acquire the Nashville mayor's office, where he spent eight years raising Nashvillians' taxes and doling out huge corporate subsidies before moving on to spend more of his own money to run for governor. In the 2002 campaign, Bredesen's main promise was that he would "fix TennCare," and the main selling point for that promise was Bredesen's experience as a "healthcare executive."

Four years later, it is clear that Bredesen applied to TennCare the same methods he applied as an HMO executive: deny care, toss people off the rolls, reduce benefits. Then, to cover himself politically for his re-election campaign, he started a new healthcare program, "Cover Tennessee," which covers almost nobody, provides very little medical care, and has no permanent long-term funding source.

Meanwhile, as The Tennessean reports today, the state's healthcare spending is $152 million over budget - something that Bredesen's commissioner of finance and administration calls "not a concern" - while Bredesen's TennCare cuts meant the state forfeited about $644 million in federal matching money - and shifted some health-care costs to local governments.

And hospitals are dealing with a huge surge in uninsured patients - mainly because the governor kicked nearly 200,000 people off TennCare - costs you can expect will be passed on to you via higher insurance premiums.

UPDATE: Sharon Cobb posted a comment below that I'm reproducing here as an update to this post because it perfectly answers certain under-informed bloggers who have been taking issue with this post by asserting that Bryson voted for Bredesen's TennCare cuts. Cobb writes:

I was present on May 29, 2005 when session was running overtime to try to save some people on TennCare, and Bryson is one of the people who tried to save the sickest...the ones who would die, and some who ended up dying.

Like many legislators, he believed the Governor. When he and other legislators were presented with the FACTS on the budget and the FACTS that Bredesen intended on cutting TennCare all along, then he changed his mind when he realized the truth about the cuts.

I reedited my documentary to include people who died, since I was called a liar ...that no one died as a result of the cuts. That's a lie. GO call the widow in my film whose husband died from not being able to get his meds a liar. And the others I list. Go tell their families.

At least Bryson tried to save some of those people who would die.

And for those of you who don't know me, I'm a liberal democrat, so don't even try to accuse me of playing politics. Also, I made my film for free and have accepted no money for it...so don't try that one either.

You can see the reedited version of my film on YouTube. People died because of these cuts. To Bryson's credit, when he realized that, he tried to save the sickest ones.