Tag: Governor Haslam

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (February 12, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Jackson Baker’s post, “Haslam’s Medicaid Expansion Bill “Hanging by a Thread” …

Kelsey is a fool, a traitor, and a moron! The trifecta, as it were.

Tennessee Waltzer

The majority of people opposed to Insure Tennessee are the Tea Partiers in our legislature. Most Tennesseeans favor the program. And Brian Kelsey should hang his head in shame for being part of the taxpayer-funded state health insurance program while denying the same to the working poor of Tennessee.

Jenna Sais Quoi

It’s dangerous having someone with Kelsey’s mindset — more loyal to his narrow ideology than to the well-being of the people of Tennessee.

Concerned in Shelby County

We have someone as president who is 100 times more dangerous with his own narrow ideology and use of executive orders to bypass Congress.

Firefox

You couldn’t be talking about the current president, who has signed fewer executive orders than all presidents since Grover Cleveland and uses Republican ideas like the ACA.

Concerned in Shelby County

I’ll just put this here: “Six of seven senators who shot down Insure Tennessee have state health care.” Hint: three of them are in this article, and the fourth one is our local idiot.

Charley Eppes

About Chris Davis’ Viewpoint, “‘Night, Darlin'” …

Poetic touching tribute. You paint a picture of a moment that many of us shared in our own way. Thanks for a beautiful private look into the way a kind soul can make a difference in many lives. Larger than life. Thank God.

Peter Ceren

To be inside the P&H after last call and the doors were locked was a cross between a return to the womb and breakfast at Valhalla.

CL Mullins

About Wendi C. Thomas’ column, “Thanks, Obama!”

I’m a Democrat who pays the Halls tax and federal taxes. Insuring others keeps my own personal health care less expensive because I’m not paying for anyone else’s unpaid bills.

I also have a pre-existing medical condition that prevented me from ever getting health care outside of an employer. Without insurance, I would be spending upwards of $15,000 a year staying alive and healthy. Since the health-care exchange opened, I have had a peace of mind that I have never enjoyed before in my adult life, because I have choices that extend beyond finding a job with top-notch insurance and going broke trying to stay alive.

CSH

Rural hospitals are closing all over Tennessee. When good, God-fearing, country folk start dying on the two-hour trip to the nearest hospital, there’ll be hell to pay … for Democrats, of course. Republicans will blame Obamacare.

Jeff

I was a conservative Republican when I was laid-off from my job in 2000. The ever-increasing cost of maintaining insurance via COBRA convinced me that socialized medicine is the way to go. I don’t mind my tax dollars supporting such a system, even though Obamacare isn’t such a system and doesn’t go nearly far enough toward socialized medicine.

Republicans lose their jobs as frequently and as easily as anyone else. And I just want to laugh at retired Republicans with Medicare who oppose Obamacare.

Brunetto Latini

To those who can understand the plight of the uninsured and support medical insurance for the least of our brethren and don’t fear to speak up about it — my hat is off to you!

Truth Be Told

I hope others are joining all good Republicans like myself in leaving this country if Obamacare continues. We shall find a civilized country without socialized medicine, like … uh … uh. I’ll have to get back to you, brothers. Hold off on the packing.

tnRepublican

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Waiting for a Cure

Taking stock of his governmental realm in a luncheon address to members of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell listed several areas of public life that he was especially concerned with — most of them expected: education, public safety, and economic development prominent among them.

Mark Luttrell

An additional one that he laid special emphasis on was public health — an issue which, as he acknowledged, he had little familiarity with in his previous roles as a prisons administrator and as Shelby County Sheriff. It had come to loom large in this thinking, though — notably the problem of the county’s soaring rates of infant mortality, which have attained crisis proportions.

What, he was asked, would be the impact of a decision by the state — even at this late stage — to accept funds for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act? What has been the impact of the Haslam administration’s inclination so far not to accept the funds? And what was his attitude toward it all?

As diplomatically as possible (given that Luttrell is a member in good standing of the state’s reigning Republican Party), the mayor explained that the impact of not having the expansion funds has been serious, even critical, since a major portion of federal funding to The Med had been discontinued on the expectation that substitute funding to it and other hospitals administering indigent care would be administered through Medicaid expansion.

Luttrell took note of Haslam’s frequent reiterations of his hopes that he will be able to obtain a waiver from the Obama administration that would allow the state to secure the add-on Medicaid funding to be administered through private insurance sources. The mayor said he had hopes that Tennessee might obtain such a waiver at some point.

The reality is not so hopeful. Arkansas is the major (and perhaps the only) other state to get such a waiver, and our neighboring state began floating a more or less complete version of its plan well over a year ago. As anyone knows who has paid close attention to the workings of Tennessee state government — and especially to the actions of the last two legislative sessions — Governor Haslam has owned up to not having a developed waiver plan and is in the position of asking that one be presented to him by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Moreover, while Haslam is thought to be sincere in his wish to find some contrivance that would allow the state to make use of Medicaid funding, the fact is that the GOP majority in the General Assembly is ill-disposed toward the idea and has basically tied the governor’s hands with legislation in the session just ended. Any plan that the governor might come up with, or that he and HHS might agree on, must be approved by both chambers of the legislature.

So, like Luttrell, we Tennesseans can still hope for a cure; we just shouldn’t count on one. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Houses Divided

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Back in the days of the old Solid Democratic South (roughly, the 100-year period from the end of the Civil War to the civil rights revolution), such political disputes as existed below the Mason-Dixon line were either factional within Democratic ranks or were based on local or personal or occasionally ideological rivalries.

This was especially the case in border-state Tennessee, where the switch-over from Democratic to Republican control was later in coming than in the Deep South (though ultimately just as profound and sweeping).

In the Tennessee legislature, the most ferocious rivalries, even into the current century, were not between the two major parties. They involved power struggles between prominent Democrats — such as those between state senator Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) and foes like fellow Democratic senators Bob Rochelle (D-Lebanon) and Jim Kyle (D-Memphis).

(The ill feeling between Cohen and Kyle persists even to the present day, with the two antagonists in separate bodies — Cohen now serving as congressman from Memphis’ 9th District and Kyle holding on as leader of the rump group of Democrats in the state Senate.)

Republicans, whose foothold in East Tennessee grew slowly over time (until it began to expand geometrically and geographically in the last decade), were onlookers.

Famously and with unprecedented speed, that situation reversed itself with the statewide elections of 2008, 2010, and 2012. It is Republicans who now totally dominate state government and own what are referred to as “super-majorities” in the General Assembly. The roll call speaks for itself — 26 Republicans to seven Democrats in the state Senate; 71 Republicans to 27 Democrats and one independent in the House.

The roles are now reversed in the legislature, and it is the Democrats who are the onlookers, hoping to get a few crumbs from the table or to pass a few non-controversial measures with GOP indulgence.

There has to be some rejoicing in Democratic ranks, however, and some desperate, hopeful crossing of fingers regarding better days to come, after the contentious way in which Republicans fell out with each other in the waning days of the 2013 session of the General Assembly, which ended Friday.

Never mind that that’s probably wishful thinking. It had to be fun for Democratic legislators to hear Representative Bill Sanderson (R-Kenton) thunder his denunciation of SB 780/HB 636, prescribing a new formula for assigning judicial districts in Tennessee. This was a pet bill pushed relentlessly by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), the Senate speaker and the driving force for most of the last three years of the Republican majority and of the legislature itself.

“This bill, friends and colleagues, came from the Senate. … We are just as equal as the other chamber across the hall. Believe it or not, you belong to a chamber that is autonomous. We are the people’s chamber. They have been dictating to us from the get-go. … This bill has been crammed down our throat. … Let’s draw the line today!”

See clip:

Get Microsoft Silverlight

The line was indeed drawn, dramatically and overwhelmingly. The Ramsey-backed bill failed in the House by a vote of 28 for and 66 against — a majority of GOP members choosing to overrule the Senate’s Republican master.

The result further widened the schism between the chambers, between the speakers, Ramsey and state representative Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) in the House, and between one set of Republicans and another.

Ramsey’s response to the rebuff was to pass the word to his membership of his resolve to keep off the floor a bill to strengthen the state’s authorizing authority over new charter schools (HB 702/SB 830) that had passed the House overwhelmingly the day before, and was dear to the heart of both Harwell and Nashville mayor Karl Dean. Realizing the futility of trying to bring the bill up for a vote, Senate sponsor Dolores Gresham (R-Somerville) allowed it to be referred to the calendar committee, meaning it won’t be considered again until next year.

Democrats in both chambers, who had opposed the bill, were overjoyed.

Harwell was furious. Asked after the session had ended how “disappointed” she was that the bill had not been brought to the Senate floor, she answered, “Very … the votes were there.”

It was telling, too, that, unlike last year, the two speakers did not participate in a joint press conference with each other or with Governor Bill Haslam.

Grabbed by reporters on his way out of the Senate chamber, Ramsey was candid. Asked if the fate of the charter authorizer bill was related to that of the judicial redistricting measure, he replied, “Somewhat.” Though, when asked, he declined to use the word “retaliation,” he acknowledged, “I thought the judicial redistricting bill should pass. It didn’t. That’s where we are. … It’s not holding bills hostage. It’s that one body doesn’t agree with the other body.”

Shortly thereafter, Haslam did have a brief meeting with reporters, in tandem with the two chambers’ majority leaders, state representative Gerald McCormick (R-Chattanooga) and state senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville).

The governor conceded that not only the charter authorizer bill, which he, too, had favored, but another measure he wanted as part of his educational package, the creation of a pilot voucher system for public schools, had failed — both (though he chose not to dwell on the fact) because of dissension in Republican ranks.

“The great charter schools … we’re trying to attract to Tennessee … won’t come unless they think they have a good chance of getting approved,” Haslam lamented.

He made do by emphasizing other matters he regarded as successes — a pruned-down budget, a cut in certain taxes, the augmenting of the state’s rainy-day fund, increases in K-12 funding, changes in workers’ compensation laws, etc.

About the fallout between the two chambers and their leaderships, McCormick shrugged: “If there’s not a little tension between the Senate and the House and the governor’s office, we’re probably not doing our jobs. That’s how government works. There ought to be some tension.”

Clearly, there is, and it remains to be seen how much of it remains and how divisive the effect of it on the GOP supermajority is in the next legislative session.

See clip of complete post-session press conferfence with Governor Haslam and majority leaders McCormick and Norris:

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.