On Tuesday, I attended the weekly bloggers' briefing held at the Heritage Foundation. This week's guests at the briefing were Congressman John Shadegg (R-AZ) and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Both members of Congress spoke about the ongoing health care debate on Capitol Hill but Congresswoman Blackburn spoke about the subject from the perspective of someone who has seen firsthand the major issues involved in the government running health care. That is because Blackburn has seen such a plan and the consequences of it before in her home state of Tennessee.
A Heritage Foundation blog post about the Tennessee plan noted the following: "Rep. Marsha Blackburn has seen the future of health care in America that the Left wants to implement. Blackburn’s home state of Tennessee implemented TennCare, a Medicaid style program in 1994... Employers moved employees onto TennCare because the subsidized public plan appeared to cost less." A quick search for stories about TennCare showcases the financial problems that accompanied such a major plan. A "Washington Post" story from 2005 noted the following about the program several years after it had been implemented: "On Jan. 10, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen...announced he is cutting 323,000 low-income adults from the program and limiting services for 400,000 others. Like many other governors, Bredesen said that Tennessee's expanded Medicaid program is devouring the state budget and that he cannot afford what had been hailed as one of the most generous government health plans in the nation. " In February of this year (when that Governor was a possibility as a Health and Human Services Secretary, an Associated Press article noted the following about the Bredesen cuts: "Before the cuts were made, TennCare's growth rate was making it harder to pay for education, roads and other critical services. Tennessee led the nation in the percentage of its population on Medicaid and the percentage of its budget going to Medicaid. However, on a per-person basis, Tennessee ranked 48th in state and local tax collections." Such stories note how much this plan has grown over the past several years and cuts needed to be made to the program several years after it got started because it came too large for the state budget to manage.
Unfortunately, many people paying attention to today's national health care debate are not aware of the TennCare program or the financial problems that arose with it. With that in mind, several of the attendants at the bloggers' briefing asked Blackburn about why TennCare was not being discussed on a larger level considering its relevance in the national health care debate. Such questions are important ones to ask. TennCare should be addressed on a national level today because our country does not want to replicate the same issues that have been seen in Tennessee and it is important that Congresswoman Blackburn and other conservatives from Tennessee are able to spread the word about what a government run health care system can look like and the problems such a program creates for the taxpayers.