Tag: Governor Bill Haslam

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Editorial Opinion

Tennessee Report Cards

Ours is an age when “outcome-based” is increasingly attached to public-policy initiatives and testing of various sorts is very much in vogue, not only in education but as a measure of success or failure in other ways as well.

This week, Tennesseans can consult brand-new studies to see how the state is doing in K-12 public education and how it could be doing in health care.

First, a freshly released Rutgers University study, entitled “National Report,” grades the 50 states on the extent of their financial commitment to public education. At a time when officials of the Haslam administration and the governor himself cite various other studies as proof of the success of their education initiatives, the Rutgers report tells another story.

While the report awards Tennessee a “B” for the equity of its fund distribution — i.e., in giving poor districts a fair share of the financial pie — it gives the state a flat-out “F” in determining the size of the funding pie itself. 

In measuring teacher compensation against pay for other vocations in the labor market, for example, the report has this to say: “Wages are least competitive in Missouri, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, where teachers make around 30 percent less. Wage competitiveness worsens as teachers advance in their career.”

Keeping in mind that the ability of Tennessee’s teachers to change their economic lot for the better was undermined by the General Assembly’s abolition of their collective-bargaining rights in 2011, a long-term improvement would seem to be disproportionately dependent on the good will of state political authorities.  

On the issue of health care, a couple of reports issued during the past week by the White House eschew the course of fault-finding with Tennessee per se in favor of underscoring what the state is giving up by its failure to participate fully in the benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

What the White House makes clear in a “Fact Sheet” released this week is that Tennessee — despite itself, frankly — is reaping enormous advantages already from the ACA. These include the reduction of insurance premiums for participating Tennesseans, the elimination of out-of-pocket expenses for a variety of testing and screening procedures, the prohibition of “pre-existing illness” restrictions, and the elimination of the infamous “donut hole,” whereby Medicare prescription benefits disappeared at a certain level.

That and more constitute the high side. But what the two White House reports also make clear is that, by declining to follow through on Haslam’s proposed “Insure Tennessee” program, the General Assembly has doomed the state to an annual loss of $1.77 million in ACA Medicaid funding for health care, and to the relegation of 180,000 uninsured Tennesseans to the kind of emergency-room care that has proved ruinously expensive to the state’s over-burdened hospitals. 

The White House issued no grades as such for Tennessee state government’s performance in providing health-care opportunities on its own or in taking advantage of those provided by the federal government, but it seems clear that, at best, the state has earned an Incomplete and, at worst, another “F.”

Failing grades in education and health care? Those are unacceptable report cards.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Despite Competing Partisan Claims, the 2015 Legislative Session Was Neither a Grand Success nor a Total Flop

CREDIT: JB

JB

GOP Leaders: (l to r) House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, House speaker Beth Harwell, Governor Bill Haslam, Senator Speaker/Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris

NASHVILLE — Two sets of post-mortems on the 2015 session of the Tennessee General Assembly were held Thursday morning in the state capital — one by Governor Bill Haslam and the Republican leadership, another by the leadership of the Democratic legislative minority.

Haslam, flanked by House and Senate Speakers Beth Harwell and Ron Ramsey and by House and Senate majority leaders Gerald McCormick and Mark Norris, all sitting at a table in the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol, opened up this way:

“The primary constitutional obligation of the General Assembly and the Governor is to present a budget that balances. This actually was an extraordinary year; not only did we do that, but if you think about it, the hardest time to govern is when you actually have extra money.” An A grade, all things considered.

Half an hour later, over in the Conference Room 31 of Legislative Plaza, it was the turn of House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh, standing primus inter pares among some 18 of his party members from both chambers (the total number of Democrats in both is 30, out of a total of 132).

Said Fitzhugh, by way of starting up: “We legislated quickly, and we passed a budget. That’s about it.” Inasmuch as the veteran Leader from Ripley was among the many in both parties and both chambers who had felt rushed by the session’s hyped-up pace and among the few who could not bring themselves to vote for the budget, that was a failing grade.

In fact, both Haslam and Fitzhugh were exaggerating.

The Governor actually made the claim that “all of what you would call Governor’s bills were passed,” when his most important initiative of all, his Insure Tennessee Medicaid-expansion plan, was blocked in both the special session that began the legislative year and in the regular session.

JB

Democratic Leaders: with House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh at podium; Others include House Caucus Leader Mike Stewart and Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris.

And, while Fitzhugh made a point of naming the failures of Insure Tennessee and of a late tax-relief bill to benefit veterans as reasons for his displeasure, it was also true that several measures opposed by Democrats were blocked as well, and by a bipartisan coalition. Among those were a bill to allow de-annexation of rebellious communities from cities and, for the third or fourth year in a row, a bill allowing for a modest school-voucher start-up.

True, a GOP-backed bill to strike down local options on banning guns in parks passed both chambers, but Haslam has made clear his disagreement with the bill and said on Wednesday that he would decide within a week — maybe as soon as Friday — whether to veto it.

UPDATE: To the surprise of most (and the acute dismay of many) the Governor signed the latest guns-in-parks bill on Friday, abolishing thereby the freedom-of-action of cities and other local jurisdictions regarding firearms in their park areas.

There was actual bipartisan concord on several matters — including virtual unanimity in passage of a home-grown educational standards bill to replace Common Core that was so similar in nature to the much-abused original as to be its fraternal twin.

And even the late failure in the House (on Wednesday) of a bill to permit in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants was not due to partisan disagreement — though a GOP right-winger, Rep. Matthew Hill (R-Jonesborough) may have sullied it for some Republicans by comparing it to President Obama’s immigration directives. The real problem may have been the absence of two Democratic supporters from the vote, both for work-related reasons.

House Democratic caucus leader Mike Stewart (D-Nashville) did what he could Thursday to deflect possible recriminations against the two, Bo Mitchell and Darren Jernigan, both from Davidson County, by saying, “This is a citizen legislature. Absences are going to happen.” The fact remains that the bill fell one vote short of the 50 needed for passage.

Stewart was less forgiving in the case of Insure Tennessee’s failure, clearly brought about by the failure of the Governor’s own Republican Party (with some exceptions) to support it. An “extraordinary failure,” the Democratic caucus leader called it, and, indeed, even as Haslam vowed at the GOP availability to continue supporting it as “the right thing to do,” Lt. Governor/Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, sitting to the Governor’s immediate left, opted out loud for the alternative of a two-year scenario involving election of a Republican president in 2016 and conversion of Medicaid funds into pure block grants.

The Democrats, for their part, vowed to renew their support for Insure Tennessee. Fitzhugh announced that the combined party caucuses would be sending Haslam a letter before the week ended beseeching him to call another special session to deal with the measure. It’s fair to say that’s pretty unlikely, and the fact that next year is an election year decreases the likelihood of action in the 2016 session as well, especially given the scenario spelled out by Ramsey.

The Governor had expressed pride in getting safely through two “contentious” matters in the session just concluded. One was the Common Core matter, and that could be stacked up with other education-related successes of the Haslam agenda, including the roughly $170 million in “new money” appropriated for K-12 education and backing for higher education initiatives as well, including Drive for 55 and Tennessee Promise, both aimed at raising the level of adult post-secondary education.

Haslam was on thinner ice in expressing satisfaction in how the legislature had skirted (to his mind) major controversy in limiting anti-abortion legislation to the imposition of a 48-hour waiting period. The Democrats made whoopee on that matter, regarding which Planned Parenthood and various organized women’s groups remain outraged. “Their mission is to change the way women live. They are taking their rights away,” Rep. Sherry Jones (D-Nashville) maintained.

Still, a fair assessment of the just-concluded session from a neutral observer might be: Could have been worse; surely could have been better. Some of the outright wack stuff, like the attempt to make the Bible an official state book, was beaten down by bipartisan action, and there was intermittent harmony on other issues as well.

One such was the hectic pace of the legislature’s increasingly abbreviated sessions — an innovation that, quite obviously, has been driven by Ramsey, who has set mid-April adjournment deadlines for a body that in recent years had continued its deliberations well into summer.

At the Republican leadership availability in the old Supreme Court chamber, Ramsey had expressed pride in what he called cost-conscious “efficiency” gained from the sped-up pace and claimed, “We didn’t even feel rushed.” But, after a brief pause, in which he must have noticed either slight murmurs or rolled eyes out there among his auditors, he added, “OK, we were rushed.”

Earlier Thursday morning, a bipartisan group of legislators having breakfast at the Red Roof Inn, a modestly priced alternative to the state capital’s more expensive hostelries, sat together, grumbling about what they saw as a much too frantic pace, which one or two of them attributed to Ramsey’s need to get about his auctioneering and real estate businesses as early as possible in the spring.

In any case, these legislators agreed that key bills were being overlooked in the undue haste and some, like the in-state tuition bill which they all happened to support, had fallen victim to it. If there is a true bipartisan consensus developing on any one matter, this matter would seem to be it.

In any case, here it is, still April, and the General Assembly is over and out.

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Editorial Opinion

Compromise Returns

Once in a while, even the most stiff-necked and tunnel-minded of people can somehow reach a compromise with people of another mind altogether. The phenomenon, which is increasingly rare in the political realm, actually

occurred twice in the past week — once in the United States Congress, and another time in the Tennessee legislature.

The first occasion was an agreement reached between Republicans in the U.S. Senate, now a majority in that body, and Senate Democrats, breaking a stalemate and clearing the way for a Senate confirmation vote on President Obama’s nomination of Loretta Lynch to be attorney general. There has not been, and is not now, any serious doubt as to Lynch’s qualifications. A deadlock between the two parties had threatened to turn into one of those endless GOP filibusters that have cursed the Congress ever since the voters of the United States dared to elect a Democratic president in 2008.

Ironically, it was the Republican takeover of the Senate in last fall’s election that may have created the preconditions for a deal. With Republicans now in charge of both legislative chambers in Washington and with an open-seated presidential election coming up in 2016, it behooves the GOP to demonstrate that it can accomplish things, not merely obstruct them.

What had impeded agreement on a nomination vote for Lynch was Republican insistence on adding anti-abortion language to another issue pending before the Senate, a measure to counter human trafficking — a noble and surely non-controversial goal in the pure sense, but one made complicated on the Republicans’ insistence on attaching the so-called Hyde amendment, forbidding use of federal funding for abortions, to the bill.

Their argument was that a component of the bill deals with medical care for victims of human trafficking, conceivably involving the abortion procedure and therefore subject calling for the Hyde restrictions.

Democrats objected that funding for the bill’s medical-care services was derived from private sources and hence inapplicable to the Hyde provisions. But until last week, the Republican leadership in the Senate was adamant: No Hyde amendment, no trafficking bill, and as a throw-in, no vote on Lynch’s confirmation. It was the sort of blackmail that has been routine for years. 

But lo and behold, the two parties agreed to some rthetorical tweaking of the bill — a bona fide compromise — that would change nothing substantial but allowed both sides to claim victory and, just as important, would allow both that bill and Lynch’s nomination to come to a vote.

What happened in the Tennessee legislature was in a way even more amazing, because the GOP super-majority there has no real incentive to compromise for the sake of a future-tense election. The issue there was legislation, approved by Governor Bill Haslam, which in theory would substitute home-grown Tennessee equivalents for the much-abused national Common Core educational standards that a substantial part of the General Assembly’s membership had sworn to throttle. The old standards have been tweaked, an “evaluation” committee has been appointed, and there’s a new name to it all. Voila! A unanimous agreement, allowing serious educational standards to continue to exist.

Ah, compromise! Welcome back.

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Editorial Opinion

Veto the Guns-in-Parks Bill, Governor

Little by little, Governor Bill Haslam is getting used to asserting himself vis-à-vis the Tennessee General Assembly. That’s the clear lesson of Haslam’s second term,

which began auspiciously at the turn of the year with a proposal to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a consummation (worth some $1 billion in federal health-care funds annually) devoutly to be wished by the state’s hospital community, facing financial hard times and intolerable strains upon their emergency-room capacity. 

That proposal, called Insure Tennessee, was made the subject of a special session by the governor but was nipped in the bud by an adverse vote of an ad hoc Health and Welfare Committee of the state Senate, hand-picked by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, who had gotten used in Haslam’s first term to having his way with impunity. That did not deter Haslam from encouraging a bipartisan legislative coalition from bringing Insure Tennessee back up for another go-around. The proposal made it safely through two Senate committees but was next routed by Ramsey into a Commerce Committee known to contain sworn foes of the ACA (aka “Obamacare”), where it was killed again.  

When all else fails, though, the GOP’s ultras in Nashville put their energies behind whatever new bill they can find that extends even further the gun lobby’s efforts to shrink what remains of local governments’ effort to control unbridled firearms use within their jurisdictions. Here again, the governor is attempting to put the brakes on. 

The latest gun bill gathering steam in the General Assembly would not only strike down the prerogatives of local jurisdictions to restrict the presence of firearms in public areas — a clear assertion of the “less-government” party’s ongoing contempt for local authority — it would, as a result of a Senate amendment, allow gun-permit holders to strut around the state capitol grounds fully armed. Such is the reigning schizophrenia in Nashville that the shocking amendment was approved both by opponents of proliferating weaponry, who thought the amendment was so outrageous that it might sink the whole bill, and, at least in the Senate, by gun enthusiasts whose motto toward any extension of firearms seems to be the more, the merrier. 

To its credit, the state House of Representatives has thus far rejected the guns-on-capitol-grounds provision, and the bill is next due for a House-Senate conference committee, where an effort will be made to reconcile competitive versions. 

Once again, Haslam demurs. He has made explicit threats to veto the measure altogether and has said, sensibly enough, “This bill isn’t so much a Second Amendment issue. It’s a property issue,” and he has urged “mayors and county commissioners and park directors” to assert themselves regarding the pending measure. 

We’re all for this newly resolute version of our governor, and we hope he’s prepared to back up his words with the liberal use of his veto pen.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

NRA Foreplay in Tennessee

The NRA convention is coming to Nashville this weekend, so the Tennessee Legislature is trying to pass as many gun-friendly laws as possible before their overlords get here. That’s not hyperbole. Some members have actually said in public that this is a concern. The NRA must be appeased, and quickly, lest Wayne “Wackjob” LaPierre call them out from the podium as sissies. Was there ever a clearer demonstration of who these folks are actually working for?

One of this bunch’s signature pieces of legislation is the “guns in parks” bill, which would override the rights of Tennessee’s cities and counties to make the rules for allowing guns in their parks. The proposed bill essentially allows guns in all local parks, no matter what the local preference might be.

This is being done in response to overwhelming public demand, right?

Of course, it’s not. There has been no outcry from the citizenry to allow guns in our parks. Quite the opposite. Local government and business leaders around the state have denounced the law. It’s just another dog-whistle bill to appease the NRA and the state’s gun fetishists, public opinion be damned.

But they have a problem: The Senate upped the crazy a notch by adding an amendment that would allow armed handgun-carry permit holders onto the capitol grounds and into the building itself. Using their own “logic,” you could rightly ask, “What’s wrong with that?” After all, half the bozos in the legislature proudly carry guns, so you’d have plenty of responsible “good guys with guns” to take care of any responsible handgun carrier on capitol grounds who might become, er, irresponsible. Plus, there are plenty of police and security guards around. But the House doesn’t like this idea.

Let’s review, shall we? A) Our noble representatives are in favor of allowing people carrying guns to walk around freely in our parks and on our playgrounds (and, for that matter, pretty much anywhere they want), despite what the local citizenry might prefer; and B) they are not in favor of allowing people carrying guns to walk around where they are — a heavily secured and protected government facility. Nope, no hypocrisy there.

The lone hope for sanity lies in the hands of Governor Bill Haslam, who has, thankfully, expressed some reservations about all of this. He expressed regret that the legislature had not bothered to take testimony from local government leaders. (Representative Chuck “Chuck” Burpuss [R-Muletug] responded, “Testimony? We don’t need no steenkin’ testimony.”) Well, not exactly. But close.

Haslam, not surprisingly, was not invited to speak to the NRA gathering. Given his recent efforts to push through Insure Tennessee, there appears to be a spark of humanity and common sense in our governor. Here’s hoping he summons the courage to take on the anti-business, pro-bullet idealogues of his own party and vetoes this bill. In so doing, he’d show the legislature who the real sissies are.

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Politics Politics Feature

Can “Insure Tennessee” Rise Again?

NASHVILLE — By means of what many supporters of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee see as a stacked deck, an ad hoc state Senate Health and Welfare Committee last week aborted Governor Bill Haslam‘s special session and seemingly killed his Insure Tennessee proposal last week with a 7-4 vote against it on Wednesday — not quite two days after the special session had kicked off with an optimistic address by Haslam.

That vote, from a committee whose normal membership had been altered by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, the Senate speaker, effectively halted what would have been a gauntlet run for the proposal through a series of other committees, and prevented the proposal — which was couched in the form of a joint resolution — from reaching the floor of either the House or the Senate for a floor vote.

In the immediate aftermath of the committee vote, supporters of Insure Tennessee pointed out that the regular nine-member Senate Health Committee, which will reconstitute for the regular session that began this week, contains five members presumed to have been for the Insure Tennessee proposal, including the Senate sponsor, Doug Overbey (R-Maryville).

Ramsey’s ad hoc version — reshuffled, according to the Senate speaker, so as to insure that all 33 members of the Senate were evenly apportioned on the three committees that could potentially hear the bill — contained from the start a preponderance of skeptics regarding Haslam’s proposed plan. 

That hurt the proposal’s prospects, and so did the reluctance to endorse the bill of key Republican leaders — Ramsey and Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) in the Senate and Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) in the House.

Much of the resistance to the Haslam proposal was clearly based on the opponents’ ideological hostility to the Affordable Care Act, the health-care system designed by the Obama administration to expand insurance coverage — in partnership, essentially, with private insurors. A component of the act has been the provision of billions of dollars in annual grants to participating states to expand their Medicaid programs. In Tennessee, as Haslam and others pointed out, that would have meant outlays of $1.4 billion annually to TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid.

Although there were numerous Republicans prepared to vote for the bill, particularly in the House, GOP ideologues denounced the measure as “Obamacare,” despite numerous nods to marketplace methods in the Haslam version and kept on repeating discredited assertions (e.g., that the federal government would ultimately default on funding, sticking Tennessee with the bill, or that the state would not be able to extricate itself from Insure Tennessee, even though Haslam devised it as a two-year pilot program with an automatic fail-safe cut-off mechanism should assumptions prove incorrect or circumstances turn even slightly adverse).

Opponents were aided by a show of force in the hearing rooms by red-shirted representatives of “Americans for Prosperity,” a shell organization funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who also paid for ads accusing Republican supporters of Insure Tennessee-like state Representative Jimmy Eldridge (R-Jackson) — of having “betrayed” Tennessee.

Predictably, there was a firestorm of criticism in the aftermath of the bill’s rejection, from legislative Democrats and from some Republicans as well, from representatives of Chambers of Commerce and from the Tennessee Hospital Association, whose member institutions had guaranteed to pay whatever future expenses for Insure Tennessee that the federal funding did not directly cover.

The Shelby County Commission, which had voted 12-0 to encourage legislative support for Insure Tennessee three weeks ago, reacted to the proposal’s defeat with a 10-1-1 vote for a fresh resolution on Monday, sponsored by conservative Republican Terry Roland of Millington, urging that the Haslam proposal be reconsidered in the regular session now begun. The desperate financial needs of The Med (now known as Regional One Health) and the predicament of Tennessee’s uninsured population were cited by another GOP conservative, Mark Billingsley of Germantown.

Weighing in at some length also was Republican County Mayor Mark Luttrell, who said, among other things, “I think our citizens in Shelby County deserve more. There should have been a full hearing before the Tennessee General Assembly.”

And, amid calls in the General Assembly itself for renewed consideration of Insure Tennessee, Governor Haslam, whose initial statements following rejection of his proposal were fatalistic, included some determined, even upbeat-sounding statements in his “State of the State” address to a joint session Monday night.

From the governor’s speech: “Last week, the decision was made not to move forward with Insure Tennessee. However, that does not mean the issues around health care go away. Too many Tennesseans are still not getting health coverage they need in the right way, in the right place, at the right time. An emergency room is not the place where so many Tennesseans should be going for health-care services. It’s not the best health care for them, and it’s costing us a lot more in the long run.

“Health-care costs are still eating up too much of our state’s budget and impacting the federal deficit and nation’s debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if we maintained health-care costs at their current levels, which we know are inflated, for the next eight years — just kept them flat — we’d eliminate the nation’s deficit. To do that, we can’t keep doing what we have been doing.

“So, though the special session has ended, I hope we can find a way to work together to address those problems.”

• The Memphis mayoral race, just as many expected, and just as some — existing candidates included — were hoping, is filling up. The latest to declare a candidacy is Shelby County Commission Chairman Justin Ford, who had promised the media he would reveal his decision to them on February 9th. And, came Monday, February 9th, Ford did just that.

In a conversation with reporters during breaks in Monday’s commission meeting at the County Building, Ford said he’d been thinking about a mayoral race for four or five years (or about the time he was first elected to the commission in 2010), and, after paying brief homage to the Ford family’s commitment to public service, made special note that his father, former councilman, commissioner, and interim county mayor Joe Ford, was able to raise “half a million dollars” in a race against then Mayor Willie Herenton in 1999. “It won’t be [any] different this time,” avowed Ford, who said he would run on issues of economic development, health care, education, and public safety.

Asked about the fact that the mayoral field was fast multiplying, Ford said, “The more the merrier. When you look at any type of race, especially in this democracy, in the city of Memphis, we’re accustomed to change. The more people in the race the better. They bring different perspectives [for] the opportunity for people to make the decision whether or not they want some change.”

Victory, he said, could come to “whoever has a resounding message, goes door to door, and also raises the right amount of money.”

Ford said he was aware that both Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, a declared mayoral candidate, had already raised prodigious amounts of money. “I’ve seen their financial disclosures,” he said.

As an incumbent, Wharton had a head start, Ford acknowledged. “Incumbents are hard to beat, so at the end of the day, if you don’t have a focus and have a real plan, you might not be successful.” But, he noted, “We’re a long, long way from the finish line.” And a few months, for that matter, before petitions for the October election become available in April.

Other candidates already declared are Wharton, Strickland, former Commissioner James Harvey, and former U of M athlete Detric Golden. Considered likely to enter the race are Councilman Harold Collins, New Olivet Baptist Church Pastor and former School Board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams.

• An effort last Wednesday by county Commissioner Steve Basar to hold a review of the joint city/county EDGE (Economic Development and Growth Engine) board — billed as an “update” on the published Commission agenda for Basar’s economic development committee — was forestalled, with several members insisting on the presence of EDGE board members before having such a discussion. Basar agreed to defer the discussion until the presence of board members, who had not been invited to last week’s commission session, could be arranged, likely in March.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Leading From the Top

So far in 2015, we have  been sufficiently dosed with annual “State of …” speeches delivered by the heads of government of most direct importance to us — the governor of Tennessee and the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County.

And we have heard both preamble and follow-up speeches from all three officials. Though, as expected, all three, Governor Bill Haslam, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, found much to boast about, they all also, with varying degrees of frankness, touched upon some dire needs — for more money, more efficiency, more ingenuity, or whatever — to avoid a curtailment of vital governmental services, including provisions for public safety, that all citizens, regardless of ideology, insist on.

All three chief executives can, with some justification, state a claim that serious efforts have been made within their jurisdictions over the past several years to operate their governments in accordance with the dictates of economy and the needs of hard-pressed taxpayers. But, even amidst the boasting, all three conceded the degree of difficulty they’re operating under.

As Wharton acknowledged on Tuesday, the strain of keeping the city in the black has been considerable. Speaking of the wrenching changes he deemed necessary in the benefits package of city employees, Wharton said, “We’re all scarred, but our city is better off as a result.”

And Luttrell has confessed that the incentives offered to potential new businesses by the EDGE (Economic Development and Growth Engine) board supervised by himself and Wharton are under fire and very likely — like the board itself — in need of review.

Meanwhile, Haslam also has his problems. He is fresh from having offered a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly an unusual bargain — some $1.4 billion annually in federal funding (a measurable part of it derived from this state’s taxpayers in the first place) in order to facilitate health-care insurance for an estimated 200,000 Tennesseans who have not been able to afford such coverage. 

Temporarily, anyhow, this bonanza — based on a carefully structured plan with numerous free-market components — has been denied to these citizens, as well as to the state’s over-burdened hospitals, by an ad hoc state Senate committee. The committee was stacked in advance by Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey with opponents of the governor’s plan for Medicaid expansion, called Insure Tennessee, and denounced by them as synonymous with the imagined excesses of “Obamacare.” This, despite the fact that the Haslam’s plan has numerous distinguishing features and was designed to spare the state of Tennessee and its taxpayers any expense whatsoever.   

Perhaps the General Assembly, meeting now in regular session, will revive Insure Tennessee. We hope so. The Shelby County Commission, in two bipartisan votes, has urged just that in no uncertain terms. So have our two mayors. We hope, too, that the scars spoken of by Wharton will heal, and that his and Luttrell’s devices for attracting new jobs, and for developing the workforce to assume those jobs, can reach the right kind of equilibrium to satisfy all components of what is still a seriously divided community.

We agree that these leaders have all managed to get some roses to bloom. But the thorns are still there, too, and somehow have to be plucked.

Categories
News News Feature

Haslam’s Next Move

Although I’ve never been there, I can imagine that somewhere inside Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam’s office is a picture. I envision it as a photo of a bright, ambitious, and idealistic Emory University college student proudly standing next to former iconic Tennessee U.S. Senator Howard Baker. It would have been taken when Haslam volunteered to work on Baker’s reelection campaign in the 1970s. I can further imagine Haslam worshipped the man whose colleagues dubbed him “The Great Conciliator” for his uncanny ability to politically maneuver diverse factions into seeking workable compromises for the benefit of the common man, because it was the right thing to do.

In a previous column, I, like many others, scoffed at Haslam’s 21-month attempt to work with the federal government to craft an expanded health insurance plan tailored for Tennessee. I criticized him for what I perceived as his foot-dragging to aid the 280,000 Tennesseans who fall through the cracks of Medicaid and are left unable to pay for simple medical care or are victimized by the ravages of a catastrophic illness. I will admit I should not have been so quick to judge his intentions or his determined strategy at devising a workable proposal.

But as we found out last week, even the best of intentions seems to carry no weight with the current Tennessee General Assembly. To have Haslam’s well-thought-out Insure Tennessee plan fail to even get out of a Senate committee is an abomination, especially for anyone still deluded enough to think our elected officials are chosen to do the will of the people.

The majority of Tennesseans favored taking the available $2.8 billion in federal dollars over two years to finance the program. Using the inclusive vision practiced by his political mentor, Baker, Haslam methodically garnered the support of the state’s medical associations, bankers, businessmen, and law firms. He had fact-based rebuttals for any questions about the validity of the plan, including the trump card of it being a “pilot” program that could be dropped after two years of enactment. But, once again, sinister forces within and outside Tennessee’s borders used their financial and political influence among state legislators to defeat the proposal, mainly by invoking the conservative rallying cry of Obamacare.

Haslam appears to have thrown in the towel on pushing any further efforts toward passing Insure Tennessee. He was quoted in The Commercial Appeal as saying, “At the end of the day, I’m really disappointed that 280,000 people who could have had health-care coverage, at least right now, it doesn’t look like we have a path to get them there. That’s the end result to me.” To which I say:

Governor, look at that picture of you and Baker and ask yourself: “Why does this have to be the end of your plan? If one path is closed off then try another.”

You admitted you hammered out the final approval to go forward from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services in December, and then announced it in the first week of January. You then went on a whirlwind tour of the state, with a stopover in Memphis. It seemed more like a victory lap, as if the heavy legislative lifting had already been done. Yet, you didn’t have vocal support from key legislators — House Speaker Beth Harwell, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris — and only lip service from Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey.

A parade in Nashville of highly paid hospital administrators endorsing the plan doesn’t carry anywhere near the emotional impact of real people bringing their personal stories directly to the faces of legislators.

It’s time to cash in on your solid state-wide popularity. You didn’t give yourself enough lead time to drum up support. People like you. Use the bully pulpit of your office to energize your message; force legislators to listen. Then go summon that Baker voodoo for bringing opposing sides together and work out a compromise.

Governor, to breathe life back into this proposal, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do something you’ve previously chosen to avoid: getting down in the trenches and fighting for the good of all Tennesseans. You can begin by convincing yourself that it’s the right thing to do. Look again at that picture of Baker, and maybe you’ll find the inspiration and courage to do it.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Haslam’s “Good Faith” Issue

As chronicled elsewhere, Governor Bill Haslam began this week of legislative special session in Nashville with the challenge of persuading reluctant members of his Republican Party to suspend their aversion

to what they call Obamacare and accept his home-grown version of Medicaid expansion called Insure Tennessee.

Prior discussions of the matter in the media have focused almost entirely on the mechanics of the plan or the political matters at stake or the financial incentives available to Tennessee (and its hard-pressed hospitals) should the General Assembly opt to give its statutorily necessary approval to the proposal. Those financial stakes are large indeed, amounting to somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion annually. But the political obstacles are large, as well: GOP talking points against Obamacare (the vernacular name for the Affordable Care Act) are so well established that the governor’s arguments for Insure Tennessee had to be couched in terms that drew the broadest possible distinctions between his Tennessee variant and the federal act.

Accordingly, Haslam made much of marketplace methodologies embedded in Insure Tennessee — including an alternative plan-within-the-plan for vouchers to pay for private insurance, as well as requirements for co-pays and modest premiums for those new insurees opting for coverage under TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid). And the governor catered to home-state Republican sensitivities by adding an anecdote to his prepared speech involving his past entreaties to President Obama, along with those of other Republican governors, to allow Medicare funding to be dispensed to the states via block grants for the states to dispense as they wished.

But much of the governor’s speech was taken up, too, with appeals to the legislators’ hearts as well as to their heads. Opponents of Insure Tennessee have been shedding crocodile tears at the plan’s provision for discontinuing Insure Tennessee after two years if either the federal government or the Tennessee Hospital Association default on promised funding. That would drop thousands of new insurees from coverage, the critics say. To this, Haslam offered the common-sense rebuttal that two years of coverage are significantly better than no health-care coverage at all.

And he offered his listeners a real-world anecdote about a Tennessean whose stroke, resulting from his inability to afford health insurance, had “landed him in the hospital, followed by rehabilitation” and taken him out of the workforce. “He was a hard-working Tennessean who wasn’t able to get the care he needed on the front end and that has real consequences for him and his family. Having a stroke wasn’t only devastating to him and his family, it could have been prevented, and not preventing it is costly to all of us.”

The governor then, having argued facts and savings and marketplace models, laid the matter to rest on the bedrock issues of values and good will: “I think this is also an issue about who we are. My faith doesn’t allow me to walk on the other side of the road and ignore a need that can be met — particularly in this case, when the need is Tennesseans who have life-threatening situations without access to health care.”

Indeed. It’s a matter of good faith and we agree with the Governor: That’s the nub of the issue.

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Politics Politics Feature

Sentiment Divided on “Insure Tennessee”

NASHVILLE — Like his 11-minute re-inauguration speech delivered two weeks ago, Governor Bill Haslam’s 15-minute opening address Monday night to this week’s special session on Insure Tennessee, his Medicaid expansion plan, was brief and to the point and couched in accommodationist rhetoric.

The previous speech had no particular mission in mind other than to hint at a more assertive second term: “[W]e haven’t had nearly high enough expectations of ourselves. In many ways, we’ve settled and haven’t lived up to our full potential. So one thing I can guarantee you that we are not going to do in the next four years is coast to the finish line.” But Monday night’s address was designed to spell out a key resolve that could be crucial to the success or failure of that race to the finish line.

The good news, from the governor’s point of view, was the prolonged standing ovation he received upon entering the chamber Monday night — a sign of the general good will that the General Assembly, on both sides of the political aisle, continues to extend to Haslam.

The bad news, from Haslam’s point of view, was that, by general agreement, he still has — in the words of state Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin), who has been a prominent opponent of  the governor’s plan — “his work cut out for him.” Said Casada about House prospects: “He needs 50 out of 99, and right now he doesn’t have it.”

That outlook was echoed by state Representative Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), the Democrats’ House leader and a firm supporter of Insure Tennessee. Fitzhugh said, “He answered the questions. The main questions my friends on the Republican side have had. … The Republican caucus needs to show they have a concern for ‘the least of these’.'” The plan had “no downside,” said Fitzhugh, but, “I think he’s got a lot of work to do.”

State Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a foe, not just of the governor’s plan but of Medicaid expansion in general, said he thought opposition to Insure Tennessee was “mounting, the more we hear about it.”

Referencing a point Haslam had extemporized into his prepared remarks, to the effect that Republican governors had persistently expressed a wish to President Obama that Medicaid funding be presented to the states in the form of block grants, and that Insure Tennessee came close to that goal, Kelsey said, “My takeaway is this: The governor and I agree that we’d love to have a block grant in Tennessee, but that’s not what the president is offering.”

There were, however, signs that a bipartisan support coalition of Insure Tennessee from Republicans and Democrats (a distinct minority in the legislature that Haslam, however, had made a point of courting) might be possible.

In the immediate aftermath of the governor’s speech, state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat, and state Rep. Mark White, a Republican who represents East Memphis and the suburbs, agreed that Haslam had made enough distinctions between Insure Tennessee and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to coax reluctant GOP members to support the plan.

White himself had been one of those GOP members who’d been biding his time but now expressed support.”I think that was important for him to distance himself from the president,” White said. “He also gave a personal side. It’s not all politics. … The more you weigh it on our measuring scale, it weighs out that we need to do something.”

Two Democrats differed on the role of their party in the debate over Insure Tennessee. State Senator Lee Harris, the former city council member who was elected by Senate Democrats (5 members out of 33) to be minority leader, said, “It’s not about the Democrats. It’s not newsworthy what the Democrats are doing. That’s irrelevant. It’s about the Republicans. They have control of both chambers. If you’ve got control, you’ve got responsibility.”

State Representative G.A. Hardaway, another Memphis Democrat, begged to differ. Of the 26 Democrats in the 99-member House of Representatives, Hardaway said, “We hold the key in the House.”

• In his Monday night address opening the week of special session, the governor — Haslam being Haslam, a man of soft persuasion rather than faustian and bombast — artfully pitched an appeal that was simultaneously above partisan politics and designed to address what have been the main sticking points among GOP legislators.

The governor dutifully paid lip service to Republican talking points, loosing his own shots at what he consistently called Obamacare but taking pains to distinguish his own plan from the superstructure of the Affordable Care Act.

Haslam gave an explanation for why, in 2013, he had rejected the opportunity to expand Medicaid (TennCare in Tennessee) — an expansion that would have allowed the state to avail itself of about $1.5 billion annually, money which the state’s hospitals, charged with caring for indigent patients, contended they desperately needed.

He hadn’t accepted expansion then, the governor said, because “expanding a broken program doesn’t make sense. … But I also didn’t think that flat-out saying no to accepting federal dollars that Tennesseans are paying for — that are going to other states, and that could cover more Tennesseans who truly need our help — I didn’t think that made much sense either.”

Accordingly, he said, he decided to provide his own example of how a governmental health-care plan should work, spending the time since that decision in 2013 to devise what he told the assembled legislators is a two-year pilot program that has incorporated free-market principles, both through an optional voucher component for use with private insurance plans and through requiring co-pays and modest premiums — “skin in the game” — of those new insurees who chose to go through TennCare.

Haslam pointed out that Insure Tennessee would add no new costs to the state budget, since the Tennessee Hospital Association (THA) had guaranteed to pay any additional costs incurred once the federal government, after two years, dropped its own subsidy from 100 to 90 percent.

If either the federal government or the THA proved unable to follow through as promised, or if the state in two years’ time decided Insure Tennessee wasn’t a good fit, the state had been assured by court decisions and the state attorney general’s advice that it could discontinue the plan.

(Pointedly, the governor, in giving the address, dropped this line from his prepared remarks: “I understand the concern, but I think it’s worthy of mention that the United States of America has never missed a scheduled Medicaid payment.”)

As for the professed concern of Insure Tennessee skeptics regarding the pain of having to discontinue coverage for new insurees after two years, Haslam said, “If you gave your loved one an option: You can have health coverage now to address your very real need and with that the possibility that you might lose it in the future, or you could never have it, which would you choose? If you think about your loved one, I bet the answer is simple.”

Ultimately, said Haslam, the state simply had an obligation to the unfortunate and the indigent, one based in commonly held spiritual precepts. “My faith doesn’t allow me to walk on the other side of the road and ignore a need that can be met — particularly in this case, when the need is Tennesseans who have life-threatening situations without access to health care.”

• Back in Memphis, pent-up controversy was also moving toward some overdue discussion. 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. Basar said he 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), but Basar said only minor modifications were needed.