State senator Todd Gardenhire speaks to the Hamilton County Pachyderm Club during their luncheon in this file photo.Take a look at the State of Tennessee's official online Newsroom & Media Center -- news.tn.gov.
To find anything about TennCare or Insure Tennessee -- which failed to get a fair vote again this week -- you'll be scrolling down to Feb. 2. Never mind that Insure Tennessee has since then been in the news often and, in fact, been rejected not once but twice by committees of the Legislature -- effectively killing a program that would use federal taxes we've already paid for our working poor's health care without the measure ever getting a full Tennessee General Assembly vote.
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Gardenhire cusses protester as tensions mount over his opposition to Insure Tennessee
Before you get to the Feb. 2 news release and video showing the governor as he "makes case for Insure Tennessee to General Assembly," you scroll past a March 31 item on the governor's budget, a March 17 Nissan expansion, some crime pieces and a couple of K-12 and higher education announcements.
Not another word about any talks or negotiations or efforts to persuade the stubborn members of Haslam's own Republican Party to expand Medicaid (TennCare here) under Insure Tennessee by accepting the federal government's pledge to pay for it at 100 percent -- $2.8 billion -- for a two-year pilot and 90 percent thereafter. Not one more word about talking with the Tennessee hospitals for the "something in writing" to back up their pledge of paying state's share of $74 million for the pilot -- something Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, and others in our local delegation said they had to see before they could vote the Governor's proposal out of committee.
Now, make no mistake: This is not to excuse Gardenhire and others in our delegation who repeatedly killed efforts to help 280,000 working poor in Tennessee -- 19,000 in Hamilton County -- get access to market health insurance.
But Gardenhire and friends were not alone in failing Tennesseans. After the first committee "no" vote on Feb. 4, Haslam wrung his hands and said the need was still here but he saw no immediate way forward. Haslam later acknowledged he had perhaps pushed a vote quickly without sufficient education for lawmakers and Tennesseans about his negotiated Tennessee version of expansion that he continually said "is not Obamacare."
But he never really seemed to fight for it.
And it was, after all, Haslam who could have signed on to the ACA all by himself two years ago had he not been angling for reelection in a very red state.
Yet Gardenhire especially should continue to take much of the brunt in Chattanooga for Insure Tennessee's rejections. On Wednesday, he was caught on cellphone video calling an East Ridge man without insurance a vulgar name after a protest in Nashville.
This is the same Gardenhire who has said the governor asked him to be on the February committee and knew how he would vote.
And this is the same Gardenhire who is shown in the video tossing the expletive over his shoulder as he walks down a long straight hallway with no bathroom in sight, though he later told a reporter, "When a guy follows you into the bathroom and starts shouting at you, he's lucky I only called him by his first name."
The moral to the sad story of Insure Tennessee is that we shouldn't trust anything any Tennessee Republican says about why all Tennesseans can't benefit from the Affordable Care Act, Insure Tennessee and the $2.8 billion in federal taxes we taxpayers have already paid to provide market insurance for our own citizens.