Lee – Memphis Flyer

To say it plainly, Monday night of this week was a challenge — for candidates who wanted one last opportunity to see and be seen; for party operatives determined, by hook or by crook, to expand the next day’s turnout for their charges; for those undecided voters who realized that their one last fleeting chance to experience specific candidates directly was at hand; for reporters whose wish was to cover the last moves of major candidates before Judgment Day on Tuesday, November 6th, and at the same time, as circumstances allowed, to check out the much-ballyhooed “Transition Report” of County Mayor Lee Harris at the FedEx Event Center (one had to wonder about the Election Eve scheduling for the event, given the competition for attention).

And complicating it all was the monsoon, a huge series of rain showers that lasted through the evening, creating flash floods and traffic jams and direly complicating all those imperative hopes and ambitions mentioned above.

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee (top) and Karl Dean with Memphis supporters on Election Eve

Still and all, it was a major night for Shelby County. It had to mean something that former Governor Phil Bredesen sandwiched in a last visit to Shelby County, at Jim Neely’s Interstate BBQ on South Third, between events in Jackson and his home town of Nashville, site of his onetime mayoralty and his two terms as Tennessee governor.

Unfortunately for those Democrats who wanted to embrace all their heroes at once, their gubernatorial nominee, Karl Dean, who succeeded Bredesen as Nashville mayor, was holding forth under the roof of Hoskins Road Spiritual Kingdom Church, many miles away, accompanied by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen. An advance ad for the event had indicated that Bredesen would be there, too — a physical impossibility and not just because of the torrential downpour.

Not only was Memphis the last stop on Dean’s long and winding trail, he was scheduled also to do a poll visit or two here on Tuesday morning. Clearly, he was a believer in the enduring nature of the Democratic blue wave, which crested here unmistakably in the runup to August 2nd, when Democratic candidates performed a clean sweep in the county general election.

And the deluge of new voter applications since, right up to the registration deadline of October 9th, had given Shelby County Election Commission officials all they could process, and then some. Moreover, even though the great Kavanaugh/Supreme Court flap had allegedly been a spur to Republican enthusiasm as well, there was no doubt that most of the new-voter gain was going to the Democrats’ side of the voter rolls.

Consequently, Dean, abetted by the ever-intensive Cohen and other attendant party stars, managed a plausible optimism in his remarks to the well-wishers who had braved the storm.

Even as Dean intended to spend the night in Memphis, his opponent, Republican nominee Bill Lee, was finishing up a last statewide dash with an address to supporters at Another Broken Egg Cafe at Park Place in East Memphis. Looking around the interior of the place, Lee described it as “packed,” and he wasn’t wrong. He proceeded to deliver a valedictory on his surprisingly successful outlier campaign that sounded simultaneously like a proclamation of victory.

And, given the apparent message of such polls and other samplings that have been taken in the general election campaign, the Franklin businessman may well have been entitled to look and sound as confident about the outcome as he did, and he elaborated once more on his running theme that redoubled efforts to expand the economy and infrastructure of Shelby County would be high on his intended agenda in office and necessary ones for the state itself to prosper.

In any case, there was no doubt that, with both Dean and Lee choosing to end their gubernatorial campaigns here, Memphis bore a prominence in this election and an influence on its results that seemed almost to hearken back to an earlier time, the Crump era, when the city was the undisputed pivot of the state’s political direction.

And, no doubt about it, the next governor of Tennessee was here on Election Eve.

It remained to be seen whether such a statement could be made about the U.S. Senate race. Bredesen certainly made an effort to show his flag, appearing here with some frequency, even before his braving of the deluge Monday night. For whatever reason, Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn, the Congresswoman whose 7th District at one point, before the last redistricting, took in a sizeable hunk of eastern Shelby County, was not so much in evidence locally.

But, during the course of things, she had had two marquee appearances with her party leader, President Donald Trump. One was at a Trump rally in Southaven last month; another was in Chattanooga, in east Tennessee, this past weekend.

• For all the bad weather and the other claims on people’s attention, a generous crowd turned out at the FedEx Event Center at Shelby Farms Monday night for a formal presentation of a report from the transition team of Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris.

The team, which numbered some 40 people, was chaired by former Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins and Paul Morris, president of Jack Morris Auto Glass. Danielle Inez was its executive director.

The transition report covered such areas as education, transportation and community development, criminal justice, health care, economic development, and government structure and metrics.

Coincident with the transition report, Harris and Shelby County Commission Chairman Van Turner recently announced the resolution of a matter that had bitterly divided the previous commission and former Mayor Mark Luttrell. That was the commission’s desire for its own staff attorney to represent its interests vis-à-vis the administration. Harris and Turner agreed on a resolution allowing Turner, as commission chair, to select an assistant county to serve the commission in that regard. That attorney will be Marcy Ingram, a longtime favorite of commission members.

Last month I got a curious envelope from the health insurance company Humana.
My wife and I are both self-employed freelancers. With no employer group plan to join, we must buy our health insurance on the individual market.

Every year for the last decade, I have spent hours researching our options, trying to find the best coverage for the best price. Before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare), we were paying ruinously high premiums and receiving only the barest of benefits. Pre-ACA, a single emergency room visit that turned out to be a false alarm ended up costing us more than $5,000. When the ACA took effect in 2014, we were among the first wave of customers to find coverage on the Health Care Marketplace. It was a dramatic improvement over the former, so-called “free market” for health insurance. Our premiums immediately dropped by more than 50 percent, and our coverage improved dramatically. A recent emergency room visit that was not a false alarm cost a little over $800.

But last year, as the Trump regime came into power, our choices on the Health Insurance Marketplace dwindled to one company. Now we were in the same boat with the hundreds of millions of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer: health insurance “choice” in name only. The real decisions are being made by unaccountable bureaucrats your workplace and the monolithic, uncaring health care companies that can endanger a company with a single price quote, and bankrupt families at their whim.
That’s why the envelope from Humana was so curious. Humana had been our health insurance company for two years, but not in 2018. When they announced their pullout from the individual health insurance market in 2017, they claimed they were losing money because by were taking on too many sick people and not enough healthy people to balance out their risk pool.

So, when I opened the envelope, I was shocked to see a check from Humana, along with a letter explaining that it was a rebate required under the ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio provision. That section of the ACA mandates that health insurance companies selling policies on the individual marketplace must spend at least 80 percent of the money that comes in as premiums on actual medical care. The other 20 percent can be used for overhead, paying salaries, and taking profits. The ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio for employer-provided health insurance is only 15 percent, meaning the individual market is, by law, the most profitable segment of health insurance industry.

The letter, which was signed by Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana Insurance Company, informed me that, “In 2017, Humana spent only 78.1 percent of a total of $372,479,024 in premium dollars on health care and activities to improve health care quality.” That means that, after rebating $7,077,191, Humana took home $74,495,804 from Tennessee premium payers in 2017. I don’t have an MBA, but that doesn’t sound like losing money to me. And yet it was not enough to keep Humana in Tennessee. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Broussard personally took home $19 million in salary, bonuses, and stock options in 2016, so you’d think Humana would need that $74 million to keep him in the manner to which he is accustomed. My attempts to get Humana to comment for this piece by calling the number they provided in their letter went comically awry.

In retrospect, Humana’s decision to leave $74 million on the table by withdrawing from a profitable individual health insurance marketplace looks less like a business decision and more like a political decision. When the company announced the decision in February 2017, it had just been denied permission by the Justice Department to merge with Aetna, and the Republican drive to repeal the ACA was in full swing. Humana’s announcement was trumpeted by Trump on Twitter as proof that “Obamacare continues to fail.” Did Broussard decide to see if he could curry favor with the president and get a favorable ruling on future mergers? We’re about to find out: Wal-Mart, which runs thousands of pharmacies across America, is currently in talks to buy Humana, which is valued at $37 billion. If that happens, people like Broussard, who own thousands of shares of Humana stock, will profit handsomely.

Lying and bad faith by a major health insurance corporation is not an aberration. As anyone who has received a baffling “benefit statement” from their insurer already knows, it’s the norm. The deeper lesson here is that health insurance companies simply cannot be trusted. Barack Obama won the presidency with a promise to fix America’s broken health-care industry. The Affordable Care Act was not a socialist government takeover of health care. It is a market-based solution designed by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, and first implemented in Massachusetts under Republican governor (and Obama’s opponent) Mitt Romney.

It was a typically Obama-esque attempt to carve out a compromise with the Republicans, and those same Republicans have spent the last four years throwing that compromise back in our faces. First, they sued to allow states to opt out of the law’s Medicare expansion, which is why tens of thousands of poor Tennesseans find themselves without health care today, and rural hospitals in the state are closing. Then, when they gained control of Congress, they voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare. Once Trump was elected, even though their repeal attempts were thwarted by massive public outcry, they have still attempted to sabotage the ACA by any means means necessary. As I write this, Newsweek has reported that the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate will increase health insurance premiums by 16 percent next year.

It’s clear from their actions that the Republicans and their corporate paymasters will never accept a deal on health care, even one like Obamacare that guarantees them tens of millions of dollars in profits. Nor do they intend to honor any agreements with Democrats. The time for compromise and half measures has long passed. With support for single payer health care currently polling at 52 percent nationally, it’s time for Medicare For All. For-profit, employer-based health insurance is the reason it’s so hard to find a full time job even at a time of low unemployment. It has produced the only nation in the developed world where health care costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy. The United States not only has the highest health care costs in the developed world, but also the worst health outcomes. We’re paying too much for too little.

When you go to the polls next week, remember that Democrats like Congressman Steve Cohen want to fix the system, and gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean has vowed to make expanding Medicare in Tennessee a top priority, while Republicans like Marsha Blackburn only want to see you stay sick, broke, and indentured to your health insurance company. Medicare For All is an idea whose time has come. For the sake of your health and wealth, vote on November 6th.