Month: February 2015

JB

Haslam, with media , giving up the ghost after Senate Committee’s kill vote of Insure Tennessee

Not to abuse the much overused bang/whimper dichotomy entered into the language by the late poet T.S. Eliot, but if any recent event ever earned the metaphor, based on something starting strong and ending weak, this now doomed and about-to-be-adjourned special session of the Tennessee General Assembly certainly did.

With a 7-4 vote of the state Senate Health and Welfare Committee against Governor Bill Haslam’s “Insure Tennessee” proposal Wednesday afternoon, the session, which began with optimism and fanfare Monday night and was intended to last at least a week, pooped out utterly.

Both Gerald McCormick (R-Chattanooga), the GOP House majority leader, and Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), the Democratic leader in that chamber, had said all week that there were enough votes in the House to pass the joint resolution, but the chance of it getting to the floor were put to rest for good by the vote of the Senate committee, which was being regarded in advance as a bellwether for other committees — and for the prospects of the special session itself.

Upon hearing of it, Haslam asked McCormick to withdrew the bill, or take it “off notice,” in legislative jargon.

Actually, things might have turned out otherwise. The way in which the two days of testimony and Q-and-A on the Senate committee went had revealed a 5-5 split, with one undecided senator, Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma) being relentlessly hot-boxed by both contending sides.

Once Bowling, whose name was early in the roll call, cast her no vote Wednesday afternoon, committee chairman Rusty Crowe (R-Johnson City), who had been aligned with those who favored Haslam’s measure, followed suit and voted no, as well.

In the first of several formal interviews held by various principals with the assembled media, Fitzhugh was reminded of the frequent assertions made by various witnesses in committees during the week — to the effect that hospitals could close in Tennessee with the failure of the Haslam bill, which would bring a minimum of $1.4 billion annually in funding under the Affordable Care Act.

Fitzhugh was asked: Would Republicans be responsible if this should occur? “Yes!” he said emphatically, in one of the shortest and most meaningful statements made by anyone over the two days of meetings and testimonies. Senate Democratic Leader Lee Harris of Memphis said substantially the same in his own availability shortly afterward.

Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey, who had kept a cautious silence from the time Governor Haslam announced “Insure Tennessee” at year’s end and had not formally adopted a position, finally spoke to the issue. The bill could never have passed in the Senate floor, he said, and he doubted that it could have, or should have, in the House, McCormick and Fitzhugh notwithstanding.

For her part, House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) had also held back from taking a position on the bill, having said at one point only that she was willing to try to formulate an alternative to “Insure Tennessee” if it was rejected. She said that Tuesday, and most observers took that statement — and her failure to endorse Haslam’s bill — as a prophecy of its failure.

When he met with the media later Wednesday afternoon, after both chambers had adjourned sine die until the start of regular session business next week, Governor Haslam confessed that, while he still thought “Insure Tennessee” was the best solution to Tennessee’s health-care issues and would like to see it brought back up in regular session, he saw no realistic way of doing that.

Still, not only Fitzhugh but a bill opponent, state Rep. Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) said Wednesday, as the Haslam bill was about to go up in smoke, that there would likely be efforts to revive it during the regular session, which begins next week.

More to come later on Special Session and its failure.

JB

‘Insure Tennessee’ supporters Jackson and Eldridge show attack ad mounted by opponents.

NASHVILLE— Imagine: A governor overwhelmingly reelected without real opposition only three months ago
is still so popular that his first appearance of his new term before a General Assembly composed almost entirely of his own party members draws such prolonged and hearty applause that he has difficulty persuading them to cease so he can speak.

Now consider: The same governor then presents the key initiative of his second term, one which would bring billions annually to his state and health care within the reach of hundreds of thousands of currently insured citizens and which, moreover, would rescue numerous of his state’s hospitals from imminent insolvency.

Next, observe: That governor sees his plan, called “Insure Tennessee” and carefully developed over a period of years, brought to the brink of rejection within a day of his offering it in this week’s called special session, for no better reason, in the judgment of distressed supporters from the governor’s own party, than that opponents have branded it with the name of a president from the other party.

“If this bill was called Bubbacare instead of being compared to Obamacare, and it ought to be, there wouldn’t be any trouble getting it passed,” was the lament Tuesday evening of newly sworn-in state Senator Ed Jackson, a Republican from Jackson, who, with state Representative Jimmy Eldridge from the same city, wants the bill passed to shore up Jackson-Madison County General Hospital, a model enterprise but a hard-pressed one that serves an enormous West Tennessee area.

The two GOP legislators had been among those contacted on a one-on-one basis over the last two days by Governor Bill Haslam, and they, in turn,. had assured the governor that he and his “Insure Tennessee” proposal still had their support. And they, along with other supporters, like state Rep. Gerald McCormick, Republican majority leader in the state House of Representatives, openly opined that the bill had a good chance of passage it could be brought directly to the floors of the two chambers for a vote.

But first “Insure Tennessee” must undergo trial by fire in various committees in both the Senate and the House, where opponents, pervading the discussion with a variety of procedural stratagems and ideological arguments, seem to have a death grip on the bill.

In one of these, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), who prides himself on being the most dedicated opponent of not only “Insure Tennessee” but of Medicaid expansion in general and, indeed, of Medicaid in general, declared flatly on Tuesday that, in backing “Insure Tennessee,” the state’s hospitals were doing no more than seeking a financial “bailout.”

(This, despite the fact that the Tennessee Hospital Association, expressing the will of its member institutions, has pledged to foot the bill for the 10 percent of funding for “Insure Tennessee” that, in two years’ time, the state would ordinarily be responsible for under the Affordable Care Act. That’s 10 percent annually of a sum between $1 and $2 billion.)

Kelsey made his statement while seated next to a dumbfounded Ed Jackson, who, with fellow Jacksonian Eldridge, could only shake their heads later on, at a Tuesday reception at the Sheraton Hotel, at some of what they regard as misrepresentations that have surfaced during the debate.

One of these is the unabated claim by opponents of the bill that the federal government could default on its 90 percent obligation to fund expanded services, two years from now. Governor Haslam, in his Monday-night message opening this week’s special session, had included this line in his prepared remarks: “..I think it’s worthy of mention that the United States of
America has never missed a scheduled Medicaid payment,” but unaccountably, perhaps to avoid the ire of the many fed-baiters in his audience, omitted it in his floor speech.

Members of “Americans for Prosperity,” an opposition group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, whose members were all clad in red shirts, turned up in force for Tuesday’s committee hearings, competing for attention with witnesses in wheel chairs and an infirm and uninsurable East Tennessee man who, hobbling to the witness table of the House Health Committee on a cane, pleaded for the bill, saying, “What’s not broke on me is wore out.”

By the end of Tuesday’s proceedings on the Hill, House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) had let it be known that she had offered to the Governor to prepare an alternative to “Insure Tennessee” if the bill had to be withdrawn. No committee in either chamber had voted yet, though votes were expected on Wednesday — unless the bill had indeed been withdrawn by then.

“It’s all hanging by a thread,” agreed Jackson and Eldridge at the Tuesday night reception, put on for legislators by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. But the two posed proudly and, under the circumstances, defiantly, behind Eldridge’s cellphone, which bore a broadside being circulated by the aforesaid Americans for Prosperity, showing Eldridge in the same frame with President Obama and proclaiming, “Jimmy Eldridge Has Betrayed Tennesseans!”

Meanwhile, it was being taken for granted on Capitol Hill that Wednesday would be a day of judgment on “Insure Tennessee,” during which the bill could either be scuttled, bringing the current special session to a premature end, or somehow given new opportunity to collect support.

JB

Steve Basar

Even as Governor Bill Haslam’s “Insure Tennessee” plan headed toward a showdown in Nashville, in Memphis another pent-up controversy was also headed for some overdue reckoning.

On Wednesday’s committee agenda of the Shelby County Commission is a call for open discussion of the future of the Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE), which guides industrial and business expansion and awards economic incentives toward that end.

Republican member Steve Basar, chair of the commission’s economic development committee and the commission’s ex officio member of the 11-member EDGE board, placed the discussion item, stated as “Update on EDGE and Pilot Programs” and scheduled to be heard early Wednesday by the Economic Development and Tourism committee, which he heads.

Basar said he had heard “rumblings” of discontent about EDGE on the commission, including possible calls for the board’s abolition, and, as an EDGE supporter, wanted to address it.

Much of the discontent was an adverse reaction to the EDGE board’s recent decisions on PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes), and of the unprecedented awarding of a substatial PILOT to furniture giant IKEA, the first ever granted to a retail operation (and evidently the last, as EDGE spokespersons have since maintained).

Basar insisted that only minor modifications were needed in the EDGE process— such as requiring recipients of incentives to guarantee higher target levels for jobs created.