Tag: Medicaid expansion

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

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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Editorial Opinion

Call Us Pollyanna …

Attentive readers will have noticed that the current issue of the Flyer is devoted to variations on that annual chestnut, the New Year’s resolution. Our staffers have searched their souls (and reserves of will power) to provide examples

of this eternal urge to be made new and better than ever (and to expunge undesirable habits) purely through determined actions of one’s own.

If we take a few liberties with the notion, we can also find instances of such a resolve in affairs of state, where it is sorely needed. Lamar Alexander, the recently reelected senior U.S. senator from Tennessee, has become the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Alexander, as an old governmental hand (now in his third six-year Senate term, (with a lengthy spell as Governor of Tennessee and a shorter one as U.S. Secretary of Education behind him) seems bent, not on creating new habits, but on recreating old ones of across-the-political-aisle collaboration with members of the other major party. 

As governor, especially, Alexander was able to pioneer significant reforms in public education, but only with the advice and consent (and votes) of supportive Democrats, who then constituted a majority in the Tennessee legislature. Not only is Alexander capable of doing good in his own right, he is potentially a resource for President Obama to learn from. The Democratic president has had precious little luck so far in getting congressional Republicans to even consider working with him. Alexander can perhaps give both the president and his stiffer-necked GOP colleagues pointers for getting along with each other. (Yes, we know this has a Pollyanna sound to it, but so do all New Year’s resolutions.)

Tennessee’s other Republican senator, Bob Corker, who has ascended to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also well placed to effect some useful collaboration, and he has been known to proclaim (and practice) the utility of constructive bipartisanship in the past. So far, though, he hasn’t tipped his hand on meeting Democrats halfway on any of the several foreign policy issues now pending.

Closer to home, we have the case of Governor Bill Haslam, another Republican who in crucial ways of late has attempted to cross the political divide. The governor’s decision to participate in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (even if disguised within a plan called Insure Tennessee) is long overdue but welcome all the same. We suspect he’ll have more trouble convincing his fellow Republicans to go along than he will with the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, who will have their own opportunity to demonstrate government rather than partisanship.

In any case, both in Nashville and in Washington, the two power capitals that influence our destinies the most, we see evidence, however modest and tentative, of a genuine desire to change. Wishful thinking or not, that would certainly make for a Happ(ier) New Year! So let us hope.

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Editorial Opinion

Full Faith and Credit

Our Republican governor, Bill Haslam, is a pleasant and no doubt well-meaning man, and, in some ways — on the issue of using public money for private school vouchers, for example — a genuinely moderating influence on his party’s excesses.

As an example: The governor has proposed a modestly funded pilot program involving some 5,000 low-income students in demonstrably failing schools. While that might be characterized by public-school advocates as the proverbial slippery slope, what other Republicans on Nashville’s Capitol Hill — notably Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey and Lietenant Governor Ron Ramsey — would prescribe amounts to the chasm itself, an open-ended voucher program whose stipends at some point could be made available to students from any family, regardless of income.

We cite this difference of opinion as evidence that the governor has a mind of his own and can, when he chooses, resist pressure from his rank and file. Unfortunately, there are issues on which this admirable quality seems to become, in the Nixonian phrase, inoperative.

A case in point is on the matter of whether to accept upward of $2 billion in federal funding under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) to expand the state’s Medicaid coverage (administered in Tennessee by TennCare). The state’s 165 hospitals, many of which are financially strained to the brink of having to shut down, are desperate for such expansion funding, 100 percent of which would be provided by the federal government for three years, after which a recipient state would be liable for only 10 percent of the annual sum.

This is not a “liberal” cause. The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, that bastion of economic conservatism, has urged the governor to accept the funding. GOP governors as far to the right as Jan Brewer in Arizona, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and John Kasich in Ohio have accepted the funding. Yet Haslam will not, continuing instead to dangle the prospect of something he calls “the Tennessee Plan,” an amorphous private-sector alternative that even a loyal GOP legislator like state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Memphis acknowledges is a “phantom.”

Though he surely knows better, having accepted his share of federal matching funds during two terms as mayor of Knoxville, Haslam declines to contradict those in the party — Kelsey, Ramsey, and Norris among them — who purport to believe that the feds will welsh on their 90 percent funding commitment to Medicaid once the initial three-year funding period is over. Never mind that the skeptics are unable to cite a single case of federal default on such a funding guarantee.

Beyond even the issue of health care itself, what is at stake in Tennessee’s Medicaid debate is the same premise that is at risk in Washington every time (which is annually) the congressional Tea Partiers would have us default on our national debt obligations — namely, the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

To undermine that bedrock, either fiscally or rhetorically, is a disservice to the very nation that our nay-saying legislators go through the daily ritual of pledging allegiance to. The governor, who really does know better, could at least cease giving them aid and comfort.

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Unique Prism

In light of the Tennessee General Assembly’s recent reopening on Tuesday, here are a few thoughts on what lies ahead.

It is difficult to predict much that won’t have already been written by the time this goes to press, so I will share a somewhat more personal perspective written between attending to clients’ needs at the law office and packing for what may essentially be three months away from home.

Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … ” While we are eager to discharge our public duties, none are looking forward to the inevitable disruption of our private lives.

We are proud of what we have accomplished for the people of Tennessee over the past three years since Governor Haslam took office, and we look forward to maintaining the momentum, making Tennessee tops in at least 10 important ways:

Tennessee is 10th in the nation in personal income growth. The state has the ninth-highest high school graduation rate, eighth-best individual tax rate, and seventh-best destination ranking for jobs. It is rated the sixth-best state for business and careers. We are fifth in overall job growth and are the fourth-best state for business. We have the third-lowest tax burden and second-lowest cost of living, and we are first in the automotive manufacturing market.

Tennessee is also first in the Southeast in overall job growth and personal income growth. And we have the lowest debt per capita. All of this makes us the number one state in the nation for retirement.

How have we done it? We’ve made the budget “job one,” utilizing conservative management with lower taxes and less government. Unlike our counterparts in Congress, we have a balanced budget every year in Tennessee, and we have more than 140,000 new private-sector jobs to show for it.

Despite this success, or perhaps because of it, we have even more work to do if we are to maintain and improve our standing in the top 10 of so many categories.

Revenues for the current fiscal year are lagging. Increasing education costs under the Basic Education Plan (BEP) are increasing. The number of TennCare recipients has jumped by more than 50,000 — all but eliminating any new revenue which might otherwise be allocated elsewhere.

We have been here before. What’s different now is the composition of state government — a Republican governor with Republican super-majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. And I have to look at what lies ahead through a unique prism — that of Senate majority leader.

My job as the leader is to represent the Senate Republican Caucus as well as to carry the governor’s legislation under my oath to “in all appointments, vote without favor, affection, partiality or prejudice … ”

I spend much time studying the issues and listening to members of the Senate and House, Democrats as well as Republicans, whose interests and perspectives are as varied as Charles Dickens’ characters and the 95 counties from whence my colleagues come.

As critical as the budget is, we cannot ignore other diverse subjects: restrictions on the length of knife blades; regulations for hunting hogs; whether pseudoephedrine should be sold by prescription; or even the definition of Tennessee Whiskey. As I write, emails are streaming in urging me to support legislation for “sensible marijuana,” to ban “hysterectomies without signed informed consent,” and, at the behest of one of my Senate colleagues, to see to the legalization of agricultural hemp.

Thus, while the budget is job one, an array of other issues necessarily emerges. One matter of local interest will be legislation I am introducing that addresses the taking, testing, storage and use of forensic evidence in rape kits.

Other issues include pension reform for local governments that are not making actuarially required contributions; recidivism and criminal justice reform; workforce development; and questions of federalism. One of the latter is whether, in light of the dysfunction in D.C., it is time for a state-initiated national constitutional convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution to consider a balanced budget amendment and other necessary changes.

Once again from Dickens: “(I)t was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

It is a rare privilege to serve with so many who care so much at such an important time in Tennessee. 

Mark Norris (R-Collierville) is majority leader of the state Senate, where he represents District 32.