Tag: Insure Tennessee

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Politics Politics Feature

It’s a New Year in Politics, Too

As the second week of the New Year began, the aura of the holidays finally began to fade, and politics per se moved into high gear, locally, statewide, and nationally.

In Memphis, the city council stumbled over an early deadline that left a majority of applicants ineligible for a council vacancy, including a putative favorite, then recovered its balance with a fresh interpretation of the city charter by attorney Allan Wade that gave all seven hopefuls more time to complete their petitions.

In Nashville, the 2015 General Assembly convened to take on such key issues as health care, educational standards, changes in taxation, and legislation designed to exploit the constitutional changes effected by the state’s voters in the November 2014 election. In the cases of educational standards and “Insure Tennessee,” Governor Bill Haslam‘s proposal for Medicaid expansion, the trick will be to back into the essential structures of Common Core and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), respectively, with improvised Tennessee-specific substitutes.

Nationally, Tennessee’s two Republican U.S. Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, attained new levels of influence as a consequence of the GOP’s capturing a majority in the Senate. Alexander became chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and Corker ascended to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Alexander, who is behind legislation to revise the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” act, is widely regarded as a possible liaison between Republicans and Democrats in the highly fractionated Senate. Corker indicated, in a conference call with Tennessee reporters last week, that he intends to bring a new activist focus to what he regards as a drift in the Obama administration’s foreign policy. For that, he has been touted by columnist George Will as potentially “the senator who matters most in 2015,” though Corker has drawn more attention of late for his proposals to raise the federal gasoline tax.             

• The city council imbroglio and subsequent fix stemmed from the revelation late last week that only former Councilmember Barbara Swearengen Holt Ware and local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson had met what appeared to be the council’s deadline for filing a petition bearing 25 valid signatures of voters in District 7.

That would have meant that five others — including former interim Councilman Berlin Boyd, regarded in some circles as the favorite — could not vie for the right to succeed Lee Harris, now a state senator, in the vacated District 7 seat. Most of the five, including Boyd, were credited with 23 or 24 valid signatures — one or two short of the total needed — though all five had met the filing deadline of noon, last Thursday.

The situation was repaired with a hastily issued opinion from council attorney Allan Wade, who interpreted the city charter as giving additional flexibility on the deadline for submitting valid voter signatures. The new deadline was established by Wade as being Thursday, January 15th — a date that would seem to give the other candidates enough leeway to qualify.

Of the five, Boyd and Curtis Byrd Jr. had already submitted 23 signatures deemed valid by the Shelby County Election Commission (whose chairman, Robert Meyers, had noted that it was the council, not the commission, which had applied the signature requirement for regular elections to the instance of filling vacancies). Audrey Jones and David Pool had 24, and Charles Leslie had 15.

The council will choose a successor to Harris from among the ultimately eligible candidates next Tuesday, January 20th.

• At a farewell dinner last week for Harris, who was recently elected by his party colleagues in the Senate to be Democratic leader there, the new state senator got off a memorable quip: “Within this month, I’ll be drawing three government checks — from the city council, from the state Senate, and from the University of Memphis Law School. That proves I’m a Democrat!”

• The council does not lack for quipsters. Councilman Kemp Conrad, who was the host for a massively well-attended holiday party over the break, responded to someone’s suggestion that he might consult city planning czar Robert Lipscomb for help in building a parking garage to accommodate excess traffic. “A TDZ!” Conrad proposed.

• It would appear that the forthcoming session of the General Assembly in Nashville will not lack for controversy. The formal convening of the legislature, at noon on Tuesday, was preceded by a 10 a.m. “Women’s March on Nashville,” whose participants included another new state senator from Memphis, former Tennessee Regulatory Authority member Sara Kyle, who was elected in November to succeed her husband, Jim Kyle, now a Shelby County chancellor.

The rally was called to address several matters, including health, wage, and poverty issues, but a central concern of it was to counter a proliferation of bills in the legislature to impose new restrictions on abortion in the wake of the narrow passage of Amendment 1 by state voters in November.

Tennessee Right to Life, an organization that supports the proposed restrictions, indicated in advance that it had plans for a counter-demonstration.

Besides the abortion measures, other expected controversies include a renewed fight over proposed Common Core standards and efforts by several Republicans, including state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, to abolish the Hall Income Tax in the face of resistance from Governor Haslam, who considers the potential loss to state revenues to be prohibitive.

But the major battle will take place in a session within the session. Haslam has called a special session, to begin on February 2nd, dealing with his “Insure Tennessee” proposal for accepting Medicaid expansion funds under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

The governor’s plan, which apparently is assured of a waiver from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provides for a two-track structure in which persons eligible under poverty-level guidelines could either accept vouchers to purchase private health insurance plans or come under TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, through acceptance of modest co-pays and premiums.

Funding could amount to as much as $2 billion annually, with the federal government absorbing the full costs for two years and 90 percent of them after that period. The state Hospital Association, which has been lobbying tirelessly for the Medicaid expansion funds, has indicated it would assist with the remaining financial obligation after the two-year period.

Haslam has made a special appeal to the General Assembly’s Democratic minority to help him pass enabling legislation for Insure Tennessee. A bill spearheaded by Kelsey and other opponents of Medicaid expansion to require legislative approval of any administration plan under the ACA was passed in the last General Assembly. And, though Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey has expressed a degree of open-mindedness, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville and several other GOP members seem reluctant to endorse Insure Tennessee.

The sentiment of six GOP legislators from Shelby County who addressed the Republican Women of Purpose group at Southwind TPC last week varied from lukewarm to defiantly opposed to the governor’s plan.

State Representative Curry Todd prophesied “a lot of blood-letting” in the special session regarding the plan; Kelsey insisted Republicans needed to “shrink the size of government, not … expand the size of government,” and cast doubt as to whether the federal government would or the state Hospital Association could pay its pledged share in two years’ time. State Representative Jim Coley lamented the plan’s “dependence on the federal government” and said he “hope[d] to persuade the governor this is not the most appropriate plan.”

State Representative Steve McManus said it might not be so easy to opt out of the plan after two years as Haslam suggests. He contends that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services might withhold Medicaid funds entirely as retribution. “It’s like Hotel California,” he said, meaning that once you check into the plan, you can never leave.

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Shelby GOP Legislators Express Doubts About “Insure Tennessee”

CREDIT: JB

JB

State Reps. Ron Lollar and Jim Coley meet with members of the Republican Women of Purpose.

For what it’s worth, Governor Bill Haslam’s “Insure Tennessee” plan for Medicaid (TennCare) expansion may not go down that well with Republican legislators from Shelby County. Speaking at a luncheon meeting of the Republican Women of Purpose on Wednesday at the ballroom of Southwind TPC, several of them weighed in on the matter.

Predictably, perhaps, state Senator Brian Kelsey, an opponent of Medicaid expansion per se,  insisted Republicans needed to “shrink the size of government., not…expand the size of government” and cast doubt as to whether the federal government would or the state Hospital Association could pay its pledged share in two years’ time.

State Rep. Jim Coley lamented the plan’s “dependence on the federal government” and said he “hope[d] to persuade the Governor this is not the most appropriate plan.”

State Rep. Steve McManus said it might not be so easy to opt out of the plan after two years as Haslam suggests. He contends that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services might withhold Medicaid funds entirely as retribution. “It’s like Hotel California,” he said, meaning that once you check into the plan, you can never leave.

State Rep. Curry Todd prophesied “a lot of bloodletting” in the special session regarding the plan, scheduled to begin February 2.

Coley and Todd were alarmed about the prospect of both a state and a federal gasoline tax and implied criticism of Senator Bob Corker for proposing the latter.

*On other matters, state Rep. Ron Lollar said he was “concerned about our leadership welcoming President Obama to Knoxville on Friday” and further concerned “about what we’re buying into” as a result. While most of the legislators expressed reservations about Common Core, state Rep. Mark White made a point of saying he was open-minded on the subject, that it was important to assert educational standards.

*Another issue brought up by the legislators — especially Kelsey and White – was the possibility of de-annexation legislation. Southwind has just been annexed by Memphis. (On Thursday, incidentally, a Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that Chancellor Jim Kyle, who recently denied a restraining order on the annexation, should not have heard the case because of leftover litigation he was still handling on behalf of the City of Memphis.)

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Politics Politics Feature

A Surprise Consensus in Tennessee Government

Events in Tennessee state government were on center stage this week, with the convening of the Tennessee General Assembly just around the next turn of the calendar.

The big political/governmental news of the week was, beyond doubt, Governor Bill Haslam‘s announcement of a provisional agreement with the federal government on an alternative Tennessee plan for Medicaid expansion in Tennessee.

The plan, which Haslam called “Insure Tennessee,” would, he said, “leverage” Medicaid-expansion money under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a two-year “pilot program” that would provide coverage for the currently uninsured and prepare them for eventual “transition to commercial health coverage.”

Haslam said the agreement with the federal government was “verbal” at this point, but that a formal request for waiver from standard ACA requirements would follow, with expectations of approval.

Under the terms of legislation passed in the last session of the Tennessee General Assembly, any agreement reached between the governor and the federal government on Medicaid expansion must be approved by both houses of the legislature. Haslam said he would work diligently to achieve that approval in a special session to be held in January, in advance of the regular 2015 session of the General Assembly.

If approved, the plan apparently would, like standard Medicaid expansion, make the state eligible for millions of dollars in new funding under the ACA, a result that the state’s hospital executives, many of them facing critical shortages, have been aggressively lobbying for.

Initial response to the plan on the part of Tennessee’s public officials was overwhelmingly positive on both sides of the party line, with Tennessee’s two Republican U.S. Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, quickly conferring their approval, as did the state’s ranking Democrats, 5th District Congressman Jim Cooper of Nashville and 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis (though Cohen was one of several Tennessee Democrats to deplore the GOP-dominated state government’s long delay in responding to the proffer of substantial federal funding.

At stake has been millions of dollars in potential aid to fund medical coverage for indigent patients through TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid (itself, ironically, established a generation ago through a waiver agreement with the federal government during the administration of the late former Governor Ned Ray McWherter).

Several of Tennessee’s hospitals have been experiencing severe financial difficulties, and they, along with prominent members of the state’s business establishment, have been lobbying hard for a change of mind by Haslam, who, confronted by widespread hostility by his fellow Republicans in the legislature to what they called Obamacare, had declined to accept funding for Medicaid expansion in 2013.

Haslam said at the time that he would attempt to reach an agreement with the Obama administration for an alternative Tennessee expansion plan that deviated from strict ACA requirements. He had subsequently been in protracted negotiations with officials of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to obtain such a waiver.

At his announcement/press conference on Monday, Haslam told reporters that federal officials had basically pre-approved a waiver for the plan — which must first, however, be approved by both houses of the Tennessee legislature under terms of a restrictive statute passed last year.

The chances for that happening were decidedly enhanced by what seemed an open-minded response to the Governor’s plan from Lieutenant Governor/State Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey.

Said Ramsey on Monday: “When a state has an opportunity to take power away from the federal government and institute real conservative reform, that is an opportunity that must be taken seriously. Governor Haslam has negotiated a deal, which returns tax dollars back to Tennessee while using conservative principles to bring health insurance to more Tennesseans. I look forward to sitting down with my fellow legislators to take a hard look at what has been negotiated to make sure that the final deal, which must be approved by the legislature, is in the long-term financial interest of Tennessee.”

Insure Tennessee does indeed cater to Republican free-market shibboleths. It proposes to use the additional federal Medicaid funds to broaden coverage for the state’s uninsured through their employers’ existing health insurance plans or by requiring modest co-pays and premiums for those accessing the aid through TennCare. The plan allows for a reduction in the latter costs if recipients pursue preventive measures and other “healthy choices.”

Democratic legislators indicated a willingness to fall in line with the governor. Typical was the response of the Democratic state House leader, state Representative Craig Fitzhugh (Ripley), who promised to “stand with” Haslam and expressed “my personal thanks to Governor Bill Haslam and the Obama administration for working together on this plan.” 

And, as noted previously in this space, Democrats are in a position to provide Haslam with backup in the governor’s professed intention to resist efforts to repeal the Hall Income Tax on the part of GOP ultra-conservatives  — several of whom, no doubt, will endeavor to thwart or amend the Insure Tennessee plan during the forthcoming special session.                

• Given the disproportionate extent of GOP control in the General Assembly — 28 of 33 members of the state Senate, 73 of 99 in the state House — it would be misleading to use the word “bipartisan” in anticipation of the coming legislative session, but optimists would surely be within their rights to hope for a greater degree of political moderation than has been the case in the past several sessions.

One possible indication of that was the easy reelection (57-15) in the House Republican Caucus last week of state Representative Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) as House Speaker over state Representative Rick Womick (R-Rockvale), a Tea Party Republican. Yet another was a vote in the state Senate Republican Caucus to replace Germantown conservative Brian Kelsey on the Fiscal Review Committee with the relatively moderate Maryville Republican Doug Overbey. 

And even Kelsey, a possible thorn in Haslam’s side on the Medicaid and Hall Income Tax issues, struck a moderate note in his announced co-sponsorship with Democratic state Representative John DeBerry (D-Memphis) of a measure that would require law enforcement agencies in Tennessee to adopt policies outlawing racial profiling.

Moreover, there had been a decisive (47-17) vote by the state Republican Executive Committee the week before to reelect as state GOP chairman the establishment-oriented Chris Devaney over Tea Party-leaning Joe Carr, the outgoing state representative from Lascassas who unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Lamar Alexander for the U.S. Senate.

 

•  Tennessee Democrats, meanwhile, were engaged in an effort to decide on a new state chair for their party, to succeed Roy Herron, who is stepping down. All five contenders for the chairmanship — which will be awarded by the state Democratic Executive Committee in Nashville in January — were in Memphis on Saturday making their pitch before an audience of state committee members and other interested Democrats at LeMoyne-Owen College.

Appearing, in sequence, were Mary Mancini of Nashville, former executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action and a recent candidate for a state Senate seat;  Terry Adams, the Knoxville attorney who ran a close second to fellow Knoxvillian Gordon Ball in this year’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate; Gloria Johnson, also of Knoxville, a long-term party activist and current chair of the Knox County Democrats, who was narrowly unseated from the state House this year by a Republican opponent; Lenda Sherrell of Monteagle, who unsuccessfully challenged 4th District GOP Congressman Scott Desjarlais; and Larry Crim of Nashville, chairman of the nonprofit Democrats United for Tennessee and a recent candidate for the U.S. Senate nomination.

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Editorial Opinion

Light in the Legislative Tunnel

Okay, so what happened to gridlock? In Washington, there was the passage of the so-called “Cromnibus” spending bill, which provides safe passage for $1 trillion in federal expenditures through 2015. No showdowns, no filibusters or cloture battles, no threats to shut down the government.

Granted, there are some objectionable provisions, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) inveighed valiantly (but in vain) against one of them — a proviso that seemingly opens the door for big financial institutions covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to resume the trading in derivatives swaps that contributed so much to the Big Crash of 2008-9.

But congressional Democrats didn’t want another shutdown battle and, for a change, neither did Republicans, who may, after their virtual sweep at the polls this year, simply want a chance to prove they can actually govern. There is still a gridlock of sorts. The word “cromnibus,” incidentally, is an amalgamation of “continuing resolution” and “omnibus.” The former term, often abbreviated as “CR,” denotes a decision to continue with the previous year’s spending and authorizations in lieu of an agreement. But only one aspect of this year’s omnibus bill had to be dealt with in that manner — funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which the GOP held up so as to leverage DHS funding next spring against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Still, the end-of-year spending bill hearkens back to what, in comparison to gridlock, were the good old days of bipartisan wheeling and dealing, mutual backscratching, and backroom deals. That’s what constitutes “progress” in our time.

And in Nashville … After two years in which the state’s new Republican super-majority successfully blocked acceptance of millions of dollars in annual funding for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the GOP’s acquiescent  but well-intentioned Governor Bill Haslam has somehow wriggled his twisted arm free and cut a deal with the feds! And even Ron Ramsey, the arch-conservative state Senate speaker and lieutenant governor who has more or less directed legislative policy during Haslam’s tenure, has professed himself open-minded about the plan that the governor is calling “Insure Tennessee.”

Never mind that Insure Tennessee may or may not be an ideal way of coping with the problem of uninsured Tennesseans or of applying the substantial federal subsidies that come with acceptance of this aspect of ACA. The plan’s complicated methodology has a Rube Goldberg-like look to it — one that will, we hope, get spelled out via debate during the special legislative session Haslam has called for in early January.

The point is that if the GOP’s legislative super-majority, which has granted itself veto power over any proposed version of Medicaid expansion, can be brought to accept Insure Tennessee, and, if the feds do follow through with a waiver for Haslam’s alternative, there are real benefits. Most importantly, TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, would get a badly needed infusion of operating funds, enough to help rescue Tennessee’s hospitals, so many of which are teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Make no mistake: Neither in Washington nor in Nashville is right-wing tunnel vision over with. In some ways it may be just beginning. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel — something worth groping toward, anyhow.