Tag: Obamacare

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Where’s the Pilot

Did you hear that FedEx successfully flew and landed a pilotless small plane last week? The system used was created by a company called Reliable Robotics, whose CEO said, “By bringing automation to aviation, we will deliver higher safety, reliability, and convenience for cargo operators and eventually for passengers.”

Hmm. A passenger plane with no pilot? Really? Who’s going to point out that the Grand Canyon is just off the starboard side or explain that we might feel a few bumps because of some rough air? Can you imagine a robotic voice droning, “Please return to your seats we are experiencing a bit of turbulence nothing to worry about flight attendants please be seated”? I’d like to see a robot make an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse

It’s almost like the state of Tennessee, where we also have no pilot, at least not one with any sense. The federal government gave Tennessee access to more than $100 million in EBT cards last spring to help children of families in financial distress due to COVID-19 to each receive $250 worth of benefits. Most states mailed the money out quickly, realizing that the pandemic was putting children of families without adequate income in peril — and realizing that that money would quickly get put into circulation and infuse $100 million into the state economy.

Tennessee? Ehhh, not so much. The Nashville numbskulls were too worried that some shysters would take that $250 card and, uh, buy baby food and diapers and groceries and sell it on the black market? Or something? Who knows? So they set up a system whereby the parents of needy children had to apply for the benefits rather than receive them automatically from the feds. Now, with a September 30th deadline to use the funds approaching, 56 percent of the children targeted by the federal aid haven’t gotten it, meaning Tennessee could forfeit $54 million in funds meant for its poorest children. Because we know those lazy welfare recipients can’t be trusted. Because racism.

It’s a lot like how Tennessee has left literally billions in federal healthcare funds on the table because the legislature refuses to take part in something they still call “Obamacare.” Their stupidity and spitefulness has caused the deaths of thousands of Tennesseans over the past eight years by denying them access to healthcare, and in the process, defunding and causing the closure of eleven rural hospitals around the state. Their ideology and racism is killing Tennesseans.

Likewise, anyone who thinks our president isn’t doing all he can to induce more racial strife before November 3rd isn’t paying attention. At the Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker raged about how Joe Biden would “destroy the suburbs.” They kept trying to frighten white people with the specter of “low-income housing,” of poor people coming to their neighborhoods, of Black people moving in. Your property values will fall, they warned. “Marxist mobs,” whatever the hell they are, are going to take over America.

“Marxist mobs will burn your cities” is this year’s “caravans of Mexicans will steal your jobs,” this year’s “Obama will take your guns!” “Black people are coming to the suburbs” is just the latest iteration of the “other” the GOP wants you to fear, because fear is all they have. Fear is the point.

It’s why President Trump is approvingly tweeting videos of white people (Vanilla ISIS?) in a caravan of pickup trucks shooting paint guns and tear gas at people on the streets of Portland. It’s why he’s retweeting a white supremacist video of a Black man pushing down a white woman in a subway. It’s why he wanted to go to Kenosha — where a young white supremacist from another state came to town and shot three people, killing two of them: to stir the pot, to get Americans to fight each other, to fear each other, to hate each other. It’s why he will be pushing to divide America by race and party every single day from now until the election.

Here’s a simple truth: If you’re supporting caravans of militias and vigilantes shooting at people in the streets, if you’re instigating racial animus and demonizing entire groups of Americans, you are not for “law and order.” You are fomenting lawlessness and disorder. The Republicans tell us over and over again that this strife-ridden, racially divided country is what we’ll get if we elect Joe Biden. No. It’s what we have now. Under this president. It’s the flight we’re on, folks, and the pilot is no robot. He’s alive, but not well. And he can’t land this plane.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The American Health-Care Nightmare

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.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

ICE, ICE Baby

Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents knocked on a door in Southaven. They had a warrant for a Hispanic man who had a criminal record, and they found him. He was living in a house with six other men, all of whom worked at an area restaurant. The other men had no criminal records, and ICE had no warrants for their arrest — in fact, had no idea who they were. But they were brown, so they got taken into custody.

Within 24 hours, all seven men were shipped to a federal prison in rural Louisiana. They didn’t get a bail hearing or access to a lawyer before being hauled off. They sit in cells in the middle of nowhere, hoping somehow their case will be taken up by an attorney, somewhere, before they are summarily deported. There have been thousands of cases like this since Attorney General Jeff Sessions unleashed ICE and gave them carte blanche to disrupt our Hispanic communities.

Yeah, I get that there are some of you reading this who’ll say, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” To which I say, “What part of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ do you not understand?” This is not how the American justice system is supposed to work, even for non-citizens.

But these raids — these stakeouts at schools and churches and restaurants, these overnight deportations — are doing what they’re designed to do. And that is to demonize and terrify men, women, and children of Hispanic descent.

So, the restaurant where the men worked had to close. The owner is still seeking replacement workers but has had little luck. This, in microcosm, demonstrates a larger problem, one that may at first seem unrelated.

In a new report on the impact of opioids in small town and rural areas, some employers stated that their biggest problem was finding “clean and sober” workers. One in 10 Mississippians is on opioids. Similar numbers abound in other mostly rural states.

Nine rural hospitals have closed in Tennessee in the past couple of years, a number that leads the nation. A study by the Rural Health Reform Policy Research Center says 17 rural Tennessee counties rank in the bottom 10 percent of counties in the country in unemployment, poverty, and per capita income.

In Tennessee, the legislature declined to take advantage of the billions of dollars in Medicaid and Medicare funding that were offered gratis via Obamacare, thereby putting the health of hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents — and many of its hospitals — in serious jeopardy, in the name of partisan politics. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Republicans have utterly failed to come up with a plan to fix health care.

So, in sum: We have a huge opioid crisis that is crippling our potential work force, yet we’re not funding hospitals in the areas where they are most needed, ensuring more poverty, more addiction, and more unemployment. On the other hand, we’re rounding up and sending off thousands of willing workers with no due process, most of whom have lived here for years — building our homes, doing our yardwork and housework, working in our restaurants. It’s tough to be an employer if most of your potential blue-collar workers are addicted or are being summarily deported. It’s dumb and dumber.

Our priorities and our politics are terribly out of whack right now. Letting partisan politics drive actions on issues such as health care and immigration seldom benefits the general public’s welfare. Or much of anything, for that matter.

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Editorial Opinion

Two Parties, One Goal

The Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission are 13-member bodies that meet with regularity, both in full session and in committee meetings. The way in which they both have come to operate might constitute a lesson of sorts to other legislative bodies supposedly higher up the chain of government. By that, of course, we mean the Tennessee General Assembly and the Congress of the United States.

The most direct contrast to those more rarefied legislative entities can probably be supplied by the county commission, because it, like the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, is elected according to the dictates of the two-party system, which pits Democrats against Republicans in electoral contests and thereafter requires the representatives of either party to sit in common assembly.

Increasingly, the commission provides a textbook example of how the two-party system is supposed to work. There are conflicts, sometimes ferocious ones, but these develop more often according to personality than to party lines. Differences that arise from the ideological divide of the two parties occur, of course, but they are usually resolved by the simple arithmetic of a vote-count (abetted in no few cases by some artful vote-trading).

Mitt Romney, father of Obamacare

After a stutter or two a few years back, the commission has resumed its “gentlemen’s agreement” tradition of rotating its chairmanship back and forth by party. This year’s chair, elected on Monday, is a Republican, Heidi Shafer, who succeeded Democrat Melvin Burgess.

During this past year, the members of the commission concurred across party lines on matters ranging from minority contracting to taxing philosophy to the essentials of a long-term “strategic agenda.” It is hard to make direct comparisons to the General Assembly, where the ratio of majority Republicans to minority Democrats is wildly disproportional, but the two houses of Congress are balanced enough between the two parties to allow for instructive contrasts. Rather infamously, the two-party system there is totally dysfunctional, and “gridlock” is too kind a name for it.

The nation has just witnessed the spectacle of one party in the Senate trying to abolish the nation’s prevailing health-care insurance system — and recklessly, without a real alternative. The scheme failed only because three members of the majority party were conscientious enough to scuttle it, calling instead for bipartisan action and consultative reform efforts.

What made the shabby repeal effort doubly ironic was that the Affordable Care Act, so tenuously rescued from Republicans acting in near-total lockstep, had been inspired by a Republican think tank and a Republican governor, Massachusett’s Mitt Romney, in the first place. The congressional GOP’s fanatic resistance to the act had been based on nothing more, ultimately, than a nakedly partisan pledge made eight years ago to oppose anything and everything offered by Democratic President, Barack Obama.

Now that Obama is out of office, that sordid motive is obsolete. Going forward, two parties, like two heads, can be better than one. But only if they genuinely take heed of each other.

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Editorial Opinion

Tennessee’s Healthcare System: Forced Into a Corner

Imagine the predicament on Tuesday of Wendy Long, director of Health Care Finance and Administration for the state of Tennessee, as well as, crucially, director of the state’s TennCare program, Tennessee’s version of Medicaid. Long, also a physician, was the scheduled luncheon speaker of the Rotary Club of Memphis at the Universitry Club, and, if she was late in taking her seat, it was, she would explain, because she was tuned into various news sources to get the latest news coming from Capitol Hill in Washington.

As it happened, Tuesday was also the day that Mitch McConnell (R-KY), majority leader of the U.S. Senate, had indicated he would require a vote in that august deliberative body relative to pending legislation regarding a possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and/or a possible replacement measure to govern the nation’s national health-care policy.

If that has a vague sound to it, it’s because McConnell’s intentions were indeed vague, as would be whatever mechanism he trotted forth for the unsuspecting Senators to deal with. McConnell’s legislative gambit on health care this week was even more a mystery than the one he laid before the Senate two weeks ago after clearing it in advance with only 12 fellow Republicans, members of an ad hoc committee appointed by the Majority Leader.

That bill, which polls showed only 11 percent of the nation’s population favoring, would have ultimately knocked some 22 percent of current insured Americans out of coverage. The bill got nowhere, as a fair number of Senate Republicans refused to go lock-step with it. (Democrats were universally opposed to both it and any other arbitrary measure repealing the A.C.A.)

On Tuesday, no one knew what McConnell had in mind at the time of Long’s scheduled Rotary appearance in Memphis. It was thought that he might seek a vote merely to forward in discussion of an as-yet-unknown health-care measure, or perhaps he had a specific bill in mind to seek a vote for, or …

Long had to wing it in her luncheon remarks, although she made it clear that any of several possible directions that the Senate (and later the whole Congress) might take on health care were crucial to Tennessee’s medical future — and especially to TennCare, a jointly funded federal/state program that administers to fully 50 percent of the state’s population, including, as she put it, “pregnant women, children, parents of children, the elderly, and the disabled.” Several of the pending Congressional possibilities under consideration by the GOP-dominated Congress — including a bill already passed by the House of Representatives and whatever has thus far been proposed in the Senate — would effectively either scuttle Medicaid at some point in the not-too-far-off future or impose unsustainable costs on Tennessee’s TennCare version.

Asked what outcome her department sought from Tennessee Republican Senators Lamar Alexander (one of McConnell’s erstwhile ad hoc group) and Bob Corker, Long answered: “Flexibilty,” (a word with numerous implications under the circumstances, some of them ironic). In her competent, detailed way, she had managed to suggest that otherwise the state — and its large population dependent on TennCare  — would shortly be forced into a corner.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Time for Town Halls on Health Care

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

A group of local Democrats, acting on the premise that several key elected officials representing this area have been less than accessible to constituents wanting to express themselves on pending health-care legislation, have scheduled their own “town hall” meeting on the matter for this Saturday, July 8th, at the IBEW Meeting Hall on Madison.

It remains to be seen how much of a turnout this event will generate beyond the party cadres who organized it, although the city and its environs certainly contain a fair number of health-care activists, as well as a considerable complex of medical-related sites, and, needless to say, as a poverty capital of sorts, a largish number of individuals whose need for medical care is both acute and problematic.

Greg Cravens

Local Republicans may either ignore the event or dismiss it as a political stunt, which, in some measure, it may very well be. But that does not diminish the need for such public ventings of the health-care issue, especially since the three elected officials pinpointed by organizers of Saturday’s event — Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker and 8th District congressman David Kustoff — have indeed not been as forthcoming to their constituents as they might be, though all have, to some degree, posted official statements on the matter.

Unfortunately, these tend to reflect standard Republican talking points against the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) rather than involving direct interactions with members of the public, many of whom depend on the ACA and fear its extinction. To the extent that statements by the three officials have been part of an actual discussion, they belong to the rote responses and the dueling positions of a highly partisan Capitol Hill.

To be sure, any effort to discuss the health-care issue in a genuinely open public meeting risks being caught in a crossfire of conflicting accusations and demands. We have all seen clips of such meetings held elsewhere. So far there have been none locally, beyond a three-hour no-holds-barred town meeting in the cavernous East High School auditorium held earlier this year by Memphis’ Democratic congressman Steve Cohen. As it happened, discord was not a feature of that jam-packed affair, though Cohen has certainly been willing to take his risks and, as may be, his lumps — which was the case in 2009 when a Tea Party crowd challenged him for his support of the Affordable Care Act at a boisterous meeting at the Bridges building downtown.

Now, with repeal-and-replace efforts underway in Congress but with the issue still hanging fire, it is the turn of ACA’s opponents — including Corker, Alexander, and Kustoff — to put themselves on the line and take their chances in free and open public assemblies. We earnestly hope that current efforts by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to ram through a hastily concocted version of TrumpCare will continue to fail, giving our elected officials a chance to do so in the forthcoming August recess.

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Opinion The Last Word

Trumpscare

CREDIT: Americanspirit | Dreamstime.com

Now that the farce called Trumpcare has imploded into finger pointing and recriminations, you can bet the insurance companies, aided by the GOP congress, will do everything in their power to assure the final destruction of Obamacare. Since the health-care industry is in turmoil, may I ask a basic question? What in God’s name is the insurance business doing in the heart of health care in the first place? Why should anyone profit from the misery of others?

I roughly understand the basics of life insurance. People come together as a group and pay continual premiums into a general account. Miss a payment, and they keep your money. Just ask me. Everybody’s premiums are invested, making the insurance companies grandly prosperous, so they can afford to pay death benefits to the beneficiaries of the dearly departed who had the courtesy to die within the allotted time frame. In other words, you’re making a bet on when you’ll buy the farm. The insurers even have mortality tables that provide odds on your death, sort of like a human expiration date. Should you win your bet, your family gets paid, only you’re dead. If you live past the 20 or 30 years usually proscribed in an insurance contract, you lose and get squat. And they keep your money — all of it.

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The whole thing is purposely vague so that you need to hire an agent, or one will surely find you. The same principles apply to other insurance instruments, like car, home, travel, or personal accident. The difference is that not everyone will be involved in a car wreck, or have their travelers’ checks stolen, or their house burn down, but sooner or later, everybody is going to get sick. 

The purpose of Obamacare was to spread the risks of health-care costs among a large group of people in order to pay the extortion rates of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. For instance, a bottle of Excedrin at Walgreen’s costs six dollars, but in the hospital, it’s six bucks a tablet. It’s all a scam assembled by the institutions that stand to reap the profits from the treatment of the sick and elderly. That’s why Obama asked for the mandate, so that younger people who tend to be healthier join the pool of the insured. Just as everyone is required to buy auto insurance, even if you never use it, everyone’s purchase of health insurance would pay the costs of colossal, backbreaking hospital bills and prescription medications.

The plan faltered because young people weren’t interested in another monthly note, and the bill had Barack Obama’s name on it. Still, 20 million people were able to take advantage of the Affordable Care Act, even if many didn’t know it was Obamacare by another name. The mistake was allowing the insurance companies to remain in place to continue fleecing the populace, but that would require a public option, and you know how those free marketeers love their capitalism. It’s well known that the United States is the only country in the civilized world that doesn’t offer health care to its citizens as a right and not a privilege. A study by the Commonwealth Fund of the health-care systems in 11 developed countries found America dead last, despite our health care being the world’s most expensive.

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By contrast, just across the river from Detroit is the nation of Canada — less than half a mile away, but light years away in the care of its citizens. Health care in Canada works like Medicare for everyone, advocated by Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign. All medical expenses are free except dental and prescription drugs. The government keeps drugs cheap by negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies on a federal level. Bringing that model to this country would bring peace of mind to patients, free doctors from endless paperwork, and since the profit motive would be removed, there would be no need for fraud or superfluous hospital tests to run up Medicare bills that benefit someone’s bottom line. Of course, that would require that hospitals be funded by the public as part of the national budget. Now that the Jolly Orange Giant has turned his back on the health-care issue, he has focused his gaze on tax cuts for the wealthy. So there will be no universal health care during Trump’s tenure — however long that may be.

The reactionary Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare more than 60 times. They had seven years to come up with a replacement, and they couldn’t do it. Speaker Paul Ryan’s hastily constructed American Health Care Act couldn’t pass muster with the GOP Freedom Caucus, the group formerly known as the Tea Party. Although health-insurance lobbyists helped shape the bill that slashed funding for Medicaid so the poor would suffer first, it still wasn’t cruel enough for the hard-right zealots. Last-minute revisions intended to throw raw meat to the jackals included turning the funding of Medicare over to the states, giving “health-care tax credits” to the elderly, the immediate repeal of Obama’s taxes on the rich, and the instituting of a test for all “able-bodied adults” to pass a work requirement before being enrolled in Medicaid.

Americanspirit | Dreamstime.com

Donald Trump

Herr Trump blamed the Democrats for not voting to destroy President Obama’s signature achievement. Trumpcare went up in flames because of the activism of millions of people who opposed it and transformed town hall meetings into episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show. As it turns out, the public seems to like their Obamacare, which was formulated by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s and enacted into law by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land and a bruising defeat for the “Art of the Spiel.” Donald Trump rose to prominence by appearing in a reality TV show called The Apprentice. He should return to a career in reality television, only this time, Trump could be the host of The Biggest Loser.
Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Fix Tennessee’s Healthcare System

Tennesseans have a strong sense of pride when it comes to valuing things like hard work and personal responsibility. People who work hard to provide for their family and contribute to their community help make Tennessee great. So, while it’s unfortunate that too many of Tennessee’s working poor are struggling to access affordable healthcare coverage, it’s encouraging to know there is a robust discussion being led by House Speaker Beth Harwell’s 3-Star Healthy Project Task Force aimed at addressing this problem.

Adam Nickas

Right now, hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans, of which more than 67,000 are residents of Shelby County, are living without access to care, falling into what’s called the “Medicaid gap.” These individuals earn too much to qualify for TennCare, our state’s Medicaid program, but too little to afford healthcare coverage on the federal insurance exchanges. These are people trying to make an honest living — three-quarters of them have worked in the last year.

Memphians never hesitate to give a helping hand, instead of simply a handout, to hardworking folks, and improving access to health care for this population does exactly that. The task force, which was established in April, is focused on finding sensible and financially responsible solutions to Tennessee’s healthcare problem. In just a few weeks, the task force will present their recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, D.C. 

In 2015, Governor Bill Haslam proposed a health-care plan, known as Insure Tennessee, to the Tennessee General Assembly. This program was designed as a for-Tennessee, by-Tennessee plan that promoted personal responsibility, imposed no new taxes, and would result in significant economic gains for our state. While the legislature did not accept the original proposal, there has been progress with the announcement of the task force to prepare a solution that increases access to affordable coverage for Tennessee’s uninsured population.

There are two critical items we hope the task force considers as they continue their work.

It’s important that any recommended solutions be comprehensive in scope. Limiting the scope of access to coverage to a segment of the Medicaid gap population leaves thousands of hardworking Tennesseans without access to affordable healthcare. A path to comprehensive coverage for this population is needed in order for the state to fully realize the economic gains from increased insurance coverage. A Tennessee study found that Insure Tennessee would create more than $1.1 billion in new health-care spending, $909 million in new income, and 15,000 full-time equivalent jobs for Tennessee residents.

One of the key drivers of these potential economic benefits is the fact that a comprehensive solution would help reverse deep cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates for Tennessee hospitals that were a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The numbers tell a striking story: Our hospitals are projected to lose $292 million this calendar year and $8.2 billion by 2024. With the closing of three hospitals in Tennessee since the beginning of 2016, we have all become acutely aware of the negative impact of those closures. Hospitals are economic engines within our communities, providing over 35,000 jobs in Shelby County and 630,000 jobs across the state. A plan that increases access to affordable healthcare can help to offset these cuts and protect our hospitals.

That’s why any recommendation from the task force must secure approval from federal officials. Without that approval, millions of dollars will continue flowing out of Tennessee and into states like California and New York. To be clear, the money being cut from our hospitals isn’t going to another Tennessee program. It is going to states that have implemented similar efforts to cover those in the Medicaid gap, and we need to bring these tax dollars back home.

The 67,000 Shelby County residents, some of whom are veterans who bravely served our country, carpenters who are building homes in our communities, and waiters and waitresses who serve us at local restaurants, deserve a solution.

Governor Bill Haslam’s 2015 proposal for Insure Tennessee provides a strong blueprint for a solution, as it would extend coverage to an estimated 280,000 of our hardworking friends and neighbors currently struggling in the Medicaid gap.

As the task force presents its recommendations in Washington later this month, we hope they bear in mind our recommendations so that their proposal aligns with Tennessee values and leads the way to a responsible, healthy future for our communities.

Adam Nickas is the executive director of Tennesseans for a Responsible Future, a nonprofit organization that supports efforts to improve the health and prosperity of Tennesseans through the promotion of sound health-care policies.

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News News Blog

Memphis To Get Obamacare Help Center

The first Health Help Agency, a help center for people with questions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), in Tennessee will open in Memphis on November 2nd at the corner of Madison and Cleveland in Midtown.

The Health Help Agency will provide free face-to-face help with ACA issues for both English- and Spanish-speaking residents. The agency’s 10 employees will be on-hand answer questions ranging from which plans are the most affordable to how to find healthcare providers to questions about deductibles and co-pays. The agency also has a website — obamacareservices.com — where residents can ask questions.

“Our approach is different because our community is unique and has unique educational challenges. Not everyone in our community has a computer and the internet. We feel everyone needs a place where they can ask questions about their health reform options and get help,” said Health Help Agency Operations Director Kelly Kish.

The agency is also working with local nonprofits to promote education around the ACA. Open enrollment for the ACA begins on Sunday, November 1st. The Health Help Agency will be located at 1339 Madison.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Age of Magical Thinking

“Magical thinking” happens when people believe that their thoughts, by themselves, can bring about change in the real world. Psychologists tell us that magical thinking is most prevalent in children between the ages of 2 and 7. An example would be, say, when a child is sad and it begins to rain, and the child attempts to make it go away by singing a happy song.

We are now living in the golden age of magical thinking, a time in which many Americans well past the age of 7 seem to think that if they believe something strongly enough, they can make it true.

For example, two Tennessee lawmakers, state Senator Mae Beavers (who else?) and state Representative Mark Pody are introducing a bill that says … well, let me just put it here, verbatim: “Natural marriage between one (1) man and one (1) woman as recognized by the people of Tennessee remains the law in Tennessee, regardless of any court decision to the contrary. Any court decision purporting to strike down natural marriage, including (a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision), is unauthoritative, void, and of no effect.”

Beavers and Pody apparently believe (1) that the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was just a suggestion, and (2) that if they just legislate hard enough they can come up with a state bill that magically trumps the law of the land. Of course, given the proclivities of our hillbilly heroes in Nashville, this bit of foolishness will probably pass, leading to expensive legal fees for the state and much derision from the rest of the country. For Jesus, of course.

Other examples? How about Kim Davis, magically thinking that she can wish away that same Supreme Court ruling, and Mike Huckabee magically casting Davis as a persecuted Christian martyr? Or Carly Fiorina, imagining a scene that never happened from a video attacking Planned Parenthood, and using it as a cudgel in the last GOP debate? Even when confronted with the evidence of her mistake on Fox News, of all places, Fiorina determinedly held her ground. “Who you gonna believe?” she seemed to be saying. “Me or your pesky facts?”

Or the Republicans in Congress voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare, when they know the votes aren’t there. Math, schmath! Let’s click our heels and vote again! Real hard, this time.

The sad thing is, it doesn’t seem to matter. Much of the public seems to have confused “reality” with reality television. All Donald Trump has to do is keep wearing his “Make America Great Again!” hat, and that’s all the evidence these folks need. It’s right there in front of their eyes. So it must be true.

In the last GOP debate, Rand Paul attempted rational discourse, saying that Trump’s making fun of people’s appearance was “sophomoric.” Trump’s response? “I haven’t made fun of your appearance. And there’s a lot to work with there.” Big laughs.

Politics has been reduced to entertainment — The Bachelor, with one-liners and homelier people. Resistance appears futile. I guess we just have to let the magic happen.