January 19, 2005

Clueless Phil

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen is, I believe, right when he says TennCare, the state's opulently generous and fraud-riddled healthcare welfare giveaway program, will bankrupt the state if it is not reigned in. And I believe he is right to blame the intransigence of the Tennessee Justice Center "advocates" for blocking meaningful TennCare reform. That said, the guy said something that was just colossally stupid the other day, unprompted, and it was reported in the Washington Post. How stupid? If When Bredesen runs for senator or president, you'll see it used against him to show just how out of touch he is on macro-economic issues.

Bredesen is keenly aware of his detractors, even singling out some by name. Lori Smith is one. Unprompted, in an interview in the Capitol, Bredesen identified her as a "poster child" for liberal advocates and the media. He denigrated Smith, and many of the 30,000 TennCare clients deemed "uninsurable," for making "lifestyle choices" to work for small businesses that do not offer insurance rather than finding jobs with the state or large companies that do.

Told of Bredesen's remarks, Smith teared up, then fired back. "With my illnesses, I don't have the luxury of getting other jobs" that would require 40 full hours each week, she said. Smith, who took a $12,000 pay cut to join the smaller, more flexible company, said she often arrives late, takes naps or misses work entirely.

Maybe the reason Bredesen's economic development focus during his eight years as Nashville's mayor was on recruiting big companies to open large operations , and that he did little to nothing to aid the city's small-business sector, was that he really thinks Big Business is where the economic vitality and jobs growth is. If so, he'll never craft a successful TennCare reform. For a successful TennCare reform will accomodate the realities of today's economy - specifically, the reality that it is small businesses, not large ones, that employ most Tennesseans and, indeed, most Americans, and it is small businesses, not large ones, that fuel the nation's economic engine and generate most of its new jobs.