Let’s face it. Tennesseans don’t like Obamacare.
They heard the promises; they saw them broken. They couldn’t keep their insurance plan. They couldn’t keep their doctor. Their insurance premiums did rise. Boy, did they.
Anything that smacked of the president’s health plan, they didn’t want. So when Gov. Bill Haslam’s plan to access federal Medicaid dollars was announced in December, despite the hard work that was done to make it Tennessee specific, to allow some workers to join their workplace plans, to require from others the personal responsibility people say insurees should have, they weren’t buying.
It took 21 months for the governor and his administration to put the Insure Tennessee plan together. It took less than three days for the General Assembly — in a specially called session — to tear it apart when a 7-4 vote went against the plan in the Senate’s special Health and Welfare Committee Wednesday.
With the federal government, there are no guarantees and a lot of broken promises, but Haslam had tried to cross the t’s and dot the i’s ahead of what was supposed to be a weeklong special session.