NASHVILLE — The health reform legislation approved over the weekend by the U.S. House would cost Tennessee government nearly $1.4 billion over a five-year period, Gov. Phil Bredesen said today.
“Our best estimate ... is about $1.4 billion, just short of $1.4 billion over the 2014-2019 period,” Gov. Bredesen told reporters, calling the cost “substantial.”
That’s nearly double the estimated $750 million price tag a competing plan recently passed by the U.S. Senate would place on Tennessee.
The additional cost would come through an expansion of state Medicaid programs such as TennCare.
“In good times, that’s a heavy lift,” said Gov. Bredesen, a Democrat who has previously criticized the U.S. Senate’s use of Medicaid to expand coverage. “When we’re digging our way out of the kind of hole we’re in right now, it gets very tough.”
Gov. Bredesen, co-chairman of a National Governors Association task force on health care reform, said he intends to “step up” his efforts to oppose imposition of costs on states.
“Look, if you’re going to pass health care reform, OK, that’s your business,” Gov. Bredesen said. “But don’t just pass it onto the states. If you don’t have enough money to do this with states, the states certainly don’t have the money.”
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Unspeakable Damage to Consumers, Employers, and Taxpayers
Forcing individuals and employers to purchase questionable insurance to pay for expensive services in a system that has failed so many is the reason that this 2000 page mess is worse than no reform.
Affordable health care can only be achieved by having cost controls on both the way funding to pay for services is raised and administered and the way delivery systems, hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies providing care and medications, are operated.
Health care reform could be the greatest economic stimulus ever but we must throw out the 2000 page reform mess and start over.
A pure public option, giving free care to everyone choosing public care, and eliminating costs for employers who choose the public option for their employees, which uses government sales tax funding, replacing insurance, along with distributing all government funded care only through government owned and operated hospitals, staffed by government employed doctors and health care providers, using proven VA systems, is the most cost effective and morally correct way for fixing half of the health care problem.
The second half of the solution is to have a pure private option, with private insurance and only private funding, paying for care and medications dispenssed by private providers, which would not be subjected to any government mandates.
Healthy people and a healthy economy, saving taxpayers hundreds of billions annually, could be achieved if the President’s reform were more prudently crafted, using proven systems.