History repeating itself - Tennessee Health Care

When looking at the push to get Government run health care in the US, people are overlooking the fact that some states have implemented this as well and it simply has not worked out. Here is Tennessee's story from the Nashville Business Journal:

TennCare's troubling history
If good intentions were dollars, TennCare would be turning a profit instead of failing in its financial and moral responsibilities to the people of Tennessee.

After all, TennCare provides access to health care for the weakest and most vulnerable Tennesseans. It insures 850,000 people who are classified by the federal government as poor and therefore unable to provide health care for themselves and their families. Another 500,000 recipients of TennCare benefits are supposedly unable to buy insurance in the open market, so they buy it through TennCare.

TennCare replaced Tennessee's Medicaid program in 1994 with the promise of bringing free-market, managed care discipline to that runaway government program. Tennessee's business community, nervous about higher taxes to feed Medicaid, was happy. Advocates for the poor were happy, particularly since TennCare opened the door to universal health insurance. Members of the Legislature were happy because TennCare shifted millions of dollars of expenses to the federal government.

The only people not happy were doctors and hospital administrators, since they believed, correctly, that they were being grossly underpaid. Since they were accused of enriching themselves on the misery of the sick and at the expense of taxpayers, no one cared.

With one-quarter of Tennessee's population on its rolls, and with that kind of broad support, it seemed TennCare could not fail.

But it did.

This was written in 1999. Now, ten years later, Googling TennCare brings up stories of fraud, terminally ill patients being dropped, disabled patients needed care being dropped, serious accidents in hospitals and custodial care being refused, thousands of disabled loosing benefits, more patient cuts, and yet another case of care being dropped -- this time a quadriplegic. The system lurches along, taking vast quantities of tax dollars from the State of Tennessee but it provides inferior health care. And people seriously think that doing this on a National scale is a good thing?