July 8, 2005

This is a Joke, Isn't It?

Former Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist, who let TennCare fester unreformed so as to exacerbate Tennessee's fiscal problems in order to make a proposed state income tax more attractive to the state legislature, has been appointed to head a new national advisory commission on improving Medicaid, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday.

Stop laughing. I'm not kidding .

It's true - a governor who disastrously mis-managed his state's version of Medicaid has been appointed to lead a national effort to reform Medicaid.

You simply could not pick a worse person to lead a Medicaid reform effort than Sundquist from both a policy and a politics standpoint.

On the policy side, Sundquist's eight years in office were marked by an abject failure to recognize TennCare was a fiscal ticking time bomb, much less any effort to actually fix it. He once famously declared that there was "no waste" in TennCare - while the state's own auditors found in an annual audit of the program a variety of money-wasting programs that had gone un-addressed for as long as seven years.

On the political side of things, this appointment gives the Bush administration's critics ammunition to claim this proves Bush has no real interest in reforming Medicaid.

WWTN 99.7 radio talk host Steve Gill thinks perhaps Sundquist is a bad pick. In an email, he wrote:

The Bush Administration has named disgraced former Governor Don Sundquist to chair a Medicaid review commission. Absolutely incredible. Does anybody in the Bush Administration care what people outside the Beltway think??? CALL THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD AND LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT PUTTING DON SUNDQUIST IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING, MUCH LESS HEALTHCARE, BASED UPON HIS TRACK RECORD ON TAXES AND TENNCARE. 202-456-1111. ALSO CALL HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY MICHAEL LEVITT. 202-619-0257.