Tag: Affordable Healthcare Act

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News News Feature

Thanks, Obama!

Last week, I joined the nine-million-plus Americans who have Obamacare.

My premiums are less than I paid with employer-sponsored health insurance, my deductible went from $2,800 to zero, and I can stick with the same primary care doctor.

Thanks, President Obama!

The opportunity to have affordable health insurance separate from a job allows me and many others to pursue more meaningful work. For the first time in my life, I can explore being not just an employee but an entrepreneur. (Or as Mitt Romney would say, a maker, not a taker.)

Nearly five years after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and after months of dithering over whether to get on board, Governor Bill Haslam has come up with Insure Tennessee, his too-little-too-late version of Obamacare.

Of course, Haslam would never call it that. But without Obamacare, it’s unlikely that the nation’s richest politician (net worth: $2 billion) would have devised a health insurance plan for the working poor.

Thanks again, Obama!

On Monday, Haslam convened a special session of the state legislature to consider Insure Tennessee. The two-year pilot of Insure Tennessee wouldn’t start until 2016. That means the state would forfeit even more than the $2.4 billion it’s passed up so far by refusing to accept federal dollars for Medicaid expansion, which was a key part of the Affordable Care Act.

Insure Tennessee is aimed at those who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,242 for an individual. Haslam’s administration estimates that 200,000 Tennesseans would be eligible for Insure Tennessee.

Even if I stood to benefit, I wouldn’t be impressed.

Said Haslam when he announced his plan: “This plan leverages federal dollars to provide health-care coverage to more Tennesseans, to give people a choice in their coverage, and to address the cost of health care, better health outcomes, and personal responsibility.”

See that last part about personal responsibility? If you thought Haslam was motivated by any Christian obligation to be his brother’s (or sister’s) keeper, those two words should disabuse you of that notion. This right-wing blather about personal responsibility is a smokescreen, part of a nasty narrative that falsely insists those who accept government assistance or subsidies in any way are reckless ne’er do wells.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that expanding Medicaid would cost Tennessee $1.7 billion over 10 years, most of which would come after 2017, when the federal government’s contribution drops to 95 percent, then 94 percent in 2018, 93 percent in 2019, and 90 percent from 2020 on.

Under Insure Tennessee, state hospitals would cover that 10 percent gap. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because patients with insurance mean more money for hospitals.

But here’s something you should know. According to a New York Times analysis, Tennessee spends at least $1.58 billion each year on incentives for businesses. That’s right, Tennessee would spend far, far less on health care for the working poor than it does on tax incentives, sales tax refunds, and corporate income tax reductions to lure companies to the state. If corporations are indeed people, then Haslam is the most compassionate man on the planet.

But if people are people — including the 918 lives that would have been saved in 2014 with Medicaid expansion — then the refusal to embrace Obamacare is cruel, mean-spirited, and immoral.

It is unconscionable that, just now, Haslam’s administration will give to Tennesseans the care and attention it’s been giving to businesses for years.

But with a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled state house and senate, Insure Tennessee is the best we will get — and it’s far from certain that the legislature’s Tea Party contingent, which is virulently anti-Obama anything, will support it.

Open enrollment for Obamacare continues through February 15th. If you don’t enroll by February 15th, you probably won’t be able to get insurance through the federal exchange this year, unless you get married, have a child, lose a job, or experience some other qualifying life event.

Go to getcoveredtenn.org to schedule an appointment with an enrollment counselor who can walk you through the process.

And once you’re enrolled, you know who to thank.

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Editorial Opinion

Keeping Hospitals Alive

The pending shut-down of Crittenden Regional Hospital in West Memphis, which followed several months of highly publicized financial crisis, should sound the alert for medical authorities in Memphis — especially at Regional One Health (formerly known as The Med), which will inherit much of the now stranded patient load at the expired hospital.

The loss of Crittenden Regional and the resultant further shift of the medical burden to Regional One highlights once again still unresolved questions of the degree to which both Arkansas and Mississippi should compensate the Memphis facility for taking care of underprivileged patients from those states who seek medical assistance on our side of the state line.

And the closing of the facility in Tennesssee’s neighboring state should stand as both a warning and a reproach to Governor Bill Haslam and the Tennessee General Assembly — the latter for its callous indifference to the needs of our state’s stressed and financially challenged hospitals, as evidenced in the Republican-dominated legislature’s persistent refusal to consider Medicaid expansion funds available through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and the former for letting himself be cowed into acquiescing in that refusal.

As Tennessee law now stands, the General Assembly having passed legislation in last year’s session giving itself de facto veto power over any future decisions Haslam might make on the issue, the governor’s hands are more or less tied. But he had ample opportunity before that point, when hospital administrators all over the state were begging him for financial relief, to avail himself of Medicaid expansion funds. He should have accepted the funds, even at the potential cost of inviting threats to his reelection. No profile in courage there, Gov.

It is true, of course, that Crittenden, like other public hospitals in Arkansas, had the benefit of Medicaid expansion funds, thanks to the fact that the state’s governor, Mike Beebe, is a Democrat, like the president, and therefore is not bound to an ideology of refusal that too many Republicans, for purely political reasons, are bound to. That fact alone kept the hospital alive for a season or two. But a pair of serious fires at the facility, one as recently as this year, pushed the hospital over the fiscal cliff.

There are numerous hospitals in Tennessee that are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and, failing the kind of unforeseen accident that happened in Crittenden, could easily survive with a fair share of the $2 billion that our state officials have opted to deny them.

Back to Arkansas: Another Democrat, U.S. Senator Mark Pryor, is running for reelection with a campaign that features public speeches on behalf of Obamacare/Medicaid expansion (both of which, however, he, rather too cautiously, calls by euphemistic names), pointing out that he himself was able to survive a bout with cancer in the 1990s, despite the fact that his insurance company back then declined to pay for the expensive treatment he required, which he then had to pay for out of pocket.

Obamacare, Pryor notes, prevents insurors from doing that to others. It can help keep hospitals alive, too.

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

HEALTH CARE

As a conservative, I know I will get panned for this letter, but sometimes even your always fully informed liberal base needs a bit better understanding. Part of the problem with this nation is that people form opinions based on opinions or desires rather than facts. The liberal side knows this and markets it well and very successfully (with a compliant media). The Republicans could not market their way out of a wet paper bag, as their disastrous approach to the recent continuing resolution and debt limit demonstrated. 

In a recent letter (October 17th issue) bashing Republicans, the writer opines about how stupid poor Republican voters are and makes this statement: “Canadians, like most civilized people, have free health care.” And therein lies the problem and the frustration for many of us conservatives. 

Health care is not free — not in Canada, not in the U.K., and not here, Affordable Care Act or not. Someone always has to pay for it. Certainly for some in our nation, it will be free, but others will be paying for it. Which is why most of us with health insurance will continue to see the cost of our coverage increase significantly through higher premiums and much higher deductibles. Even your president acknowledges this fact.

My understanding is that Canada has the liberal utopia of a single-payer system. But I can assure you, even in Canada, it is not free. It is paid for through higher taxes. For politicians to communicate that it is free is irresponsible and misleading. But that is the mentality espoused by liberal politicians and their base: the idea that everything is free and that we have a blank check for any and every entitlement program, every spending desire. 

That is the frustration conservatives have with how Obama and the liberals run the financial side of the house — completely irresponsibly (not that Republicans are much better). Spending like we do is not sustainable, yet liberals govern like it is. At some point, if unchecked, we will become the next Greece. What will liberals do when they have run out of other people’s money to spend?

Scott Brumbelow


Memphis

Republicans would have us believe their propaganda: The reason for the mandate that everyone without health-care insurance must buy some is very simple: Health-care costs have been rising by double-digit percentage points for years, costing everyone more and forcing companies to reduce or cancel their company health-care plans, or increase the cost to their employees, year after year.

The best way to keep health-care costs down is to include everyone in the insurance mix. It’s just math. The more Americans who are insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This is how insurance works. And this is why costs are lower when you are part of a group policy, instead of paying for health care as an individual.

Tea Party Republicans know this but refuse to admit it. They would rather omit the facts or just lie about them. 

Jack Bishop


Memphis

SPAY YOUR PETS!

In Macon, Georgia, recently, the city council approved a mandatory spay/neuter ordinance. The approved version of the law sets a deadline of July 1, 2014, for all dogs and cats over the age of 6 months within city limits to be spayed or neutered, with very few exceptions.

We need this law to be made state-wide in Tennessee.

Trecia Watson

Memphis

Don Henley

DON HENLEY DISSED US

I don’t know how to blog or tweet and such, so maybe this news is out there and I didn’t see it, but I can’t find any mention of Don Henley’s little rant at the Eagles concert last week. 

He said something to the effect of “It’s good to be back in Mississippi.” When the audience called out to correct him and remind him he was in Memphis, he said, “Okay, this is not an interactive concert here. I’m talking.” He was not smiling and was pretty pissy. As a lifelong fan of the Eagles and Don Henley, I was really upset by the “Mississippi” slipup and his snippiness toward the fans.

Dena Williams

Memphis

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Haslam and Health Care

CREDIT: Danziger

The naysayers seem to have had their way with Governor Bill Haslam, who announced on Monday that his administration would not attempt to establish a state-run health exchange to administer the

Affordable Care Act in Tennessee.

The governor had been supposed beforehand, on the basis of his professed confidence in TennCare’s experience in health-care matters, to favor creating a state exchange instead of leaving it to the federal government to set up its own. And the state’s insurance agencies had made it clear that they, too, preferred such a solution, which would allow them to keep on dealing with familiar faces and procedures. Moreover, taking a hands-on approach to administering the act would clearly have given the state an opportunity to tailor-make a system to Tennessee’s specific needs and hold down costs.

But the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers, in and out of the General Assembly, are still blindly raging against what they call “Obamacare” as amounting to a federal takeover of health care and have consistently made it clear they want as little as possible to do with it. Never mind that last summer’s Supreme Court decision in favor of the act, followed up by President Obama’s election victory, made implementation of the act inevitable, and, in those circumstances, a state’s declining to fashion its own managerial agency ensures a maximum amount of federal control and minimizes the prospect of the state’s ability to impose cost-control measures.

The foes of the Affordable Care Act, who mounted a noisy demonstration against it in Nashville just this past weekend, seemed not to understand that the act would be coming to Tennessee one way or another — and a state government default on managerial responsibility would be the very thing that would ensure the much-dreaded “federal takeover.”

The bottom line, though, was that a state-run exchange would have had to be approved by the legislature, and Haslam clearly lacked any enthusiasm for the kind of wrangle that would have entailed. So he made what he insisted was not a political but a “business” decision — a business decision that may end up costing the state more money.

Haslam is the chief executive of Tennessee, and leadership is both his privilege and his duty. He was elected to provide it, and, much as we’d like to give the governor the benefit of the doubt about his choice in the Affordable Care matter, we can’t shake the feeling that he has forfeited an opportunity.

There is one more health-related issue for him to decide on: whether to expand TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid) some 38 percent beyond the currently recognized poverty line, a course of action originally mandated by the Affordable Care Act but one which the Supreme Court has rendered optional. To do so would invite something of a cornucopia in federal funding, though it would decrease percentage-wise at some point in the future.

We suspect there’s profit for the state in that course and hope the governor will agree.