NASHVILLE — In his State of the State address to the General Assembly, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam promised to move “full speed ahead” in serving Tennessee taxpayers, touted the state’s successes and laid out a defense of high state education standards.
“I stand here tonight to tell you that the state of our state is enviable in many ways,” Haslam said during tonight’s annual address. “There are a lot of good things happening in Tennessee, and they’re being recognized in significant ways across the country.”
In his speech, the governor defended high education standards for students even as those standards are expected to come under attack from many fellow Republicans in the GOP-dominated General Assembly.
“It doesn’t really matter what we call our standards. What does matter is that we have the highest standards possible,” Haslam told the joint convention of the House and Senate.
Haslam received a standing ovation as he outlined putting aside nearly $100 million in a pool for teacher pay raises.
The governor also spoke of his defeat just last week in a special session when a Senate panel killed his Insure Tennessee proposal to use federal Medicaid funds to extend health insurance to 280,000 low-income Tennesseans.
“Last week, the decision was made not to move forward with Insure Tennessee,” Haslam said. “However, that does not mean the issues around health care go away. Too many Tennesseans are still not getting health coverage they need in the right way, in the right place, at the right time.”
Health care costs are still “eating up too much of our state’s budget and impacting the federal deficit and nation’s debt,” said Haslam. “According to the Congressional Budget Office, if we maintained health care costs at their current levels, which we know are inflated, for the next eight years just kept them flat we’d eliminate the nation’s deficit. To do that, we can’t keep doing what we have been doing.
“So,” Haslam said, “though the special session has ended, I hope we can find a way to work together to address those problems.”