Once a Model, a Health Plan Is Endangered

NASHVILLE, Nov. 19 - A decade after Tennessee inaugurated a health care plan for the state's most vulnerable residents that was hailed as a model for the nation, the program is once more being held up as a model - of failure in an era of soaring medical costs and voters' aversion to higher taxes.

Today the plan, TennCare, which sought to improve health care for Medicaid recipients while covering those who fall through the federal program's cracks, is on the ropes.

Gov. Phil Bredesen, a conservative Democrat and former health maintenance organization entrepreneur, has threatened the program with extinction, saying that rising costs and generous benefits - TennCare consumes nearly a third of the state's $25 billion budget - make it unaffordable unless it can be radically restructured to save money and limit benefits.
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After more than a week of tense negotiations between the governor and advocates for TennCare's 1.3 million users - nearly a quarter of the state's population, including an estimated 430,000 who would not be covered by Medicaid if TennCare disappeared - the two sides decided to "step back from the brink," as Mr. Bredesen put it.

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/20/national/20tennessee.html?hp&ex=1100926800&en=25da9ef93fba097a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Tennessee is one of the few states without an income tax. When proponents of establishing one argued several years ago that it was needed, in part, to pay for TennCare, conservative politicians and talk-show hosts increased their criticism of what they called a socialist program, and legions of "horn honkers" drove past the state capitol and TennCare offices.


And to think, the people of our nation entertain themselves via hate radio into screwing themselves

once considered a model, has been gutted by Republicanites as well.

The current crop of odious, obnoxious criminals currently masquerading as our government is hell bent to eliminate entirely the social safety net that has been a bedrock of our society since Roosevelt. Anyone who dare avail themselves of these services, or who can't, literally, live without them, are simply "those people" to these greedy fuckers and their enablers in the electorate.

I hope, fervently and with malice, that some Chimpus Khan voter's mother gets a deadly disease for which this safety is her only chance, and that she falls through one of the holes they've rent asunder. And I hope it happens on Christmas Eve or her birthday. These tax averse fuckers deserve to feel real grief, real pain.

As for Chimpus Khan himself, I hope that hole in the end of his winkie heals shut and he explodes.

These people are bloodsuckers.

Is generally incapable of discerning the cause of the fault.
It is more likely that they will be told that it was "the inefficient Liberal system that failed her"

People are stupid, that's why we're in this mess.