Tenn. Governor to End Expanded Medicaid Program
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The governor announced plans yesterday to dissolve Tennessee’s expanded Medicaid system and drop 430,000 poor and disabled people from the rolls of the healthcare program that has been devouring a large chunk of the state budget.
Democratic Governor Bredesen said Tennessee will instead return to a cheaper, more basic Medicaid program.
The move followed months of legal wrangling over the TennCare program, whose $7.8 billion price tag was projected to mushroom in coming years.
The governor held out some hope for saving the program, saying he will try for seven more days to work out an agreement with advocates who have won several court decisions about the level of health care the state must provide to TennCare recipients. But he said such a deal is unlikely.
“It pains me more than I can describe to take this path,” he said. “This is not what I planned for or what I dreamed about doing as governor.”
An attorney for the Medicaid recipients was also pessimistic about a last minute deal and accused the first-term governor of making advocates into “scapegoats.”
TennCare provides health care coverage for the poor, uninsured, and disabled, covering 1.3 million Tennesseans, or about 22% of the state population. If TennCare is eliminated, some 430,000 of them would be dropped entirely, largely families of the working poor and those whose ailments and high medical bills make them uninsurable. The remaining 900,000 or so would continue to get coverage under basic Medicaid.
Almost all states offer some supplemental Medicaid benefits, but Mr. Bredesen has said Tennessee has been more generous than other states.
Mr. Bredesen has proposed a stripped-down TennCare plan that would limit 270,000 of the recipients to only 12 doctor visits and 45 days in the hospital each year, and six prescriptions a month. But advocacy groups have challenged that plan in court, and Mr. Bredesen said that unless they back off, TennCare will have to be abandoned entirely.
Mr. Bredesen said there is a 60-day notification period to kill the program and federal approval is required. Enrollees would have six months before TennCare disappears. The governor does not need legislative approval to end TennCare.
