In late April, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee acknowledged the failure of his proposal to create universal school vouchers provided by public funds enabling students to “choose the right path educationally” by attending private schools. Despite Lee’s confidence that legislators will eventually approve his plan, it’s clear he will have to persuade skeptical rural legislators less inclined to give up some of the state funding the schools in their districts receive.
That issue won’t be resolved until the Legislature reconvenes in January. But now Lee is confronted with serious problems at the Department of Health and the Department of Children’s Services. Lee appointed the commissioners of both. It’s unclear but possible the resolution of those issues could subject the state of Tennessee to litigation and possible expensive settlements.
In May, KFF Health News reported that the Tennessee Department of Health “is supposed to hold accountable and grade the nation’s largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly.” Instead, KFF said, the department’s own records show that it has consistently given A ratings and an annual stamp of approval to Ballad Health, a 20-hospital system in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia. KFF found that the health department “awards full credit on dozens of quality-of-care measurements as long as it reports any value — regardless of how its hospitals actually perform.”
Indeed, because the state’s scoring method “largely ignores the hospitals’ performance, only 5% of Ballad’s final score is based on actual quality of care. [It] has suffered no penalty for failing to meet the state’s mandates in several areas — including surgery complications, emergency room speed and patient satisfaction.”
Ballad’s latest report showed that the median time patients spend in the ER before admittance is now nearly 11 hours — “more than three times what it was when the monopoly began and more than 25 times the state baseline.”