Discussion for article #231205
I’m glad for the folks getting insurance. But the GOP’s love of the private middle man only drives up costs.
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Is it wishful thinking to hope that stories like this make it less likely SCOTUS will blow the whole thing up?
To those more legal system aware than I, is there any valid argument to be made that this increases the danger of ruling against something that is argued to be a typo?
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Tennessee Is The Latest Red State To Reach A Medicaid Expansion Deal
TN Gov Haslem: Yep. We’re done screwin’ the poor and sick folks in Tennessee over petty politics.
Now-- Show Us the Money!™
jw1
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All he’s gonna do is call a special session of the teabagger legislature. Remains to be seen if they’ll actually go for it. After all, I hear tell that Roberts is gonna gut this thing like a fish.
Right?
Well how else do you pay back your corporate interest donors?
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The big question is … does Tennessee still get to stay on as one of the states challenging the ACA at the Supreme Court? (Haslam’s intern will probably say “only liberals would dare make that cowardly connection between our responsible actions to insure our poorest citizens and Obama’s overreach” 
)
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he actualy said no one has ever argues that we were ever going to end medicare.thats exactly what yall have been argueing has he ever read paul ryans budget proposals??? vaouchers for the elderly for health care privatizeing S.S…I guess he either got the memo that said shhhh dont say anything about us getting rid of medicare…or deny deny deny thats just silly talk
Getting people of moderate income to vote Republican (a feat, at face value, most would think impossible) is stunning in its consistently being a part of the normal American political landscape.
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Notice that Haslam is promoting a limited version of Medicaid for those 160,000 (a very low estimate, BTW) rather than the whole thing.
I happen to know Bill Haslam personally, and he’s not a bad guy.
But he’s been a signal disappointment as governor, and has given in to the far-right faction in the GOP-controlled legislature way too often.
Since we have a healthy two-party system in Tennessee—neither of those being the Democratic party—this will cause some in the legislature to set their hair on fire (the TP wing of the GOP) while others will merely fan the flames (the conservative wing of the GOP.)
Our token Dems in the legislature spend most of their time playing tic-tac-toe or Tiddlywinks, since they have zero effect on the tripe that the legislature passes except to bemoan the overt stupidity of most of it.
Haslam’s family—Pilot Oil/Flying J Travel Centers—is grooming Bill to take over from Lamar Alexander when Lamar retires from the Senate.
So Bill has become adept at following orders, so as not to upset the people he’ll have to rely on when that happens.
That’s why all this has been such a clusterfuck, and will remain one, albeit of a lesser degree.
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I thought Medicaid expansion was an all-or-nothing proposition. And that’s allowing for the various privatization schemes. How could expansion be on a limited basis?
I haven’t had a chance to locate the details of Bill’s “plan” yet.
Another GOP Governor pwned by the POTUS.
The ACA is here to stay!
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I sincerely hope that the local media will be very meticulous in going over even the high level details of this “plan”. I.e. what do the potential enrollees “give up” in this “modified” Medicare? how big are the “vouchers” and do they really offer any value? The devil is always in the details, so lets see those details!
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I’m white and say that it’s race that makes folks vote repub. They are disgusting fools.
The smartest, most diabolical thing the Reagan era GOP did was convince a bazillion white people that it was patriotic to vote GOP. In fact, a vote for the GOP was a vote for “America” and any vote against the GOP was treason.
The part that the con majority on the SCOTUS is currently aiming to blow up isn’t the Medicaid part.
Instead, the con majority is aiming to blow up the part that provides for subsidies to private insurers to allow lower middle income folks in Red states to purchase private medical care insurance.
The folks who rely on Medicaid can’t afford to buy coverage AT ALL, or else the costs to the end user of the particular care they require is prohibitive for anyone outside the top income ‘earners’.
But there’s still a real chortle full of irony in what Tennessee is doing here, what Kansas will do soon and what other Red states who initially declined Medicaid funding will be up to. The one point on which CJ Roberts dissented – from the SCOTUS majority that, on some basis or another, upheld one of the 3 legs critical to how the RomneyCare/ObamaCare Gruber-verified model works – was on automatic blank Medicaid coverage over all states constituting some weirdly parsed notion of “coercion”. Remember this? The challengers claimed that replacing state-controlled emergency medical care with Medicaid meant that the federal government was unconstitutionally ‘forcing’ Medicaid, with its federally-established-and-enforced regulatory regime, onto states which ‘might do better’ or ‘might choose to go some other way’ or whatever, on the states, and thereby ‘nationalizing’ the delivery of hospital and other types of medical care services. Roberts sided with the Federalist nitwit wingnut brigade of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and, most shamefully, the utterly noodle-headed Kennedy, in agreeing with the challengers this somehow constituted “coercion” … which is why this stupid hole in Red state budgets exists in the first place.
For-profit national and regional hospital companies and clinical care corporations immediately saw – had seen IN ADVANCE – a much more stable, reliable, simple and LUCRATIVE context in which to run their operations, in mostly Blue states which had readily accepted the Medicaid funding, when compared to failed-state balanced-budgets fixated Red states that ‘escaped’ the “coercion”. The market place spoke! And one consequence of the market so speaking is that already it’s costing vastly more money just to keep up the nationally-mandated, SCOTUS-confirmed guarantee of universal EMERGENCY medical care, than Medicaid-refusing Red states can afford. Moreover, those same Red states are forecasting increased budgetary problems over time, to the point where the constitutional guarantee of emergency medicine will in time become the biggest, even the sole, item in the ‘cost’ side of those states.
Roberts is an ideologue but not an idiot: he can see this dynamic. Having screwed with Medicaid, and proven he really didn’t see the consequent disaster for refusenik states, one can even hope that maybe he’ll be motivated against screwing around with this latest Challenge of the Moops to individual subsidization.
OTOH, having proven already he lacks the prescience to anticipate how buying into ideologically-motivated legalish nonsense can backfire, Roberts also proved he’s open to accepting that the Moops conquered Spain.
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You raise some good points, but the “coersion” part of the SC decision on Medicaid expansion referred to the ACA provision that states, in refusing to expand Medicaid, would thereby jeopardize their existing Medicaid funding. That was what the SC saw as coersion, particularly since Medicaid is a state-federal program.
I’m sure that it’s a coincidence that he’s accepting the government largess just after the election.
I wonder how many people died without insurance between the time between the time that Haslam decided that he needed the money and the time that he found it politically expedient to accept it?
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[Also thanx to Downriver Dem]
I remember, as a boy during the short time in my boyhood when I was in this country, watching Ronald Reagan in a few venues. His skill in being the “Spokesman for America” was formidable. In my opinion, his “American Face” was a Slam Dunk. He was extremely difficult for most people to dislike at face value. A few of my childhood memories of Ron (of course, there are many others held by many)…
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Reagan was the host of the G.E. Theater series. At the end of the show, Reagan, whose lopsided grin I am sure swooned a Generation of people, would say, in a half-folksy/half-determined manner, “At General Electric, Progress Is Our Most Important Product”
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Reagan was also host of the “Death Valley Days” series right before he became Calif. Governor. Looking at him, you wanted to book a flight to California as soon as the show concluded.
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A chance viewing of a WWII training film (copied on DVD) gave me a pause a few years ago. The short film was designed to emphasize safety for airplane pilots. Toward the last minute of the film I looked at the profile of the main character (the one with the “aw shucks” demeanor) and realized that this particular pilot was none other than Saint Ronnie.
That’s how we won the War.
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