It has been a given – almost from the beginning of talks about TennCare III – that anything the Volunteer State would do about exchanging a Medicaid health care waiver for a Trump administration health care “block grant” would end up costing us more money and giving Tennessee’s working poor less coverage.
It was a given because our Republican super-majority leaders simply refused to even entertain the idea of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare – even when the federal government pledged to pay for 90% of that expansion with federal tax dollars we already pay.
Twice, conservative former Gov. Bill Haslam tried to go that expansion route with a Tennessee twist. And twice the Tennessee General Assembly nixed it.
But in late 2019, Haslam’s successor, Gov. Bill Lee, followed the short-sighted fiscal conservative direction of Tennessee’s General Assembly and sought to become the first state to give the Trump administration one of the things it wanted most: to slash Medicaid spending by supplanting it with “block grants” – a strategy congressional conservatives repeatedly had tried to implement without success.
In the Trump administration’s final days, the federal government approved a 10-year renewal of TennCare – the state’s Medicaid program that uses a combination of state and federal funds to provide health insurance coverage to about 1.4 million low-income families and children, pregnant women and disabled Tennesseans.