Tennessee Proposed Cuts Highlight the Need for National Health Care

By: Chris Lugo

The time has come for national health care. Tennesseans are waking up to the reality of the health care crisis in America and politicians are hearing their concerns. On the democratic side of the isle, Senators Clinton and Obama have been making health care a core item of their speeches and making promises to do something about an issue that is affecting 47 million Americans, including an estimated 700,000 in Tennessee. That number is about to rise unless the federal government acts now.

On Monday, in Tennessee, Governor Bredesen addressed the General Assembly in his annual State of the State affair. The Governor presented a fiscally conservative budget, the sign of an economic recession that is hitting Tennessee hard with the mortgage crisis, low productivity and high costs of basic domestic goods dragging Tennessee down and revenue expectations as well. The Governor proposed further Tenncare cuts, which are on top of the cuts of almost 300,000 Tennesseans in 2005 from the health care rolls.

The discussion in the health care community has revolved around the proposed 56,000 Tennesseans to be cut in the next year, which is a carryover from the Tenncare cuts of 2005 as well as an additional 140,000 Tennesseans who will most likely be cut in the next year who will lose their Tenncare but retain their Medicare or other benefit. These people are being affected during the worst of times economically being denied one of the most basic of human needs - quality preventative health care.

We know that many people died after the 2005 Tenncare cuts in addition to hundreds if not thousands are being made destitute due to the lack of health insurance coverage. Most of these people are hard working Tennesseans, who do not have health insurance coverage through their low paying jobs or have lost their health insurance because they have existing conditions such as cancer or heart disease. Who knows how many more people will have their quality of life reduced or even ended as a result of this latest round of Tenncare cuts.

Tennesseans cannot afford to let almost twenty percent of her citizens go without health care. The costs of not having quality preventative care are too high. It is much more affordable in the long term to diagnose and treat illness in its preventable stages rather than wait until someone without health insurance shows up in the emergency room.

Still, we must lay the blame not on the Governor instead we should look at the federal government for its failure to address the basic human right of quality health care. Every industrialized country in the world except the United States extends this basic right to all of its citizens. The irony is that we already pay more per capita of our public dollars on health care than most western nations but we still have a system that fails to insure everyone, but this is not an agenda that we can leave up to the states. Tennessee should not share the burden alone of trying to insure everyone. This is part of what led to the Tenncare debacle in the first place.

Tennessee generates a large portion of its revenue from sales tax, which is an up and down stream of revenue, which disproportionately affects the poor and working classes. The only way Tennessee could have insured the preservation of Tenncare was through a state income tax, which does not yet have the political will to pass in the general assembly. In the meantime, a universal health care program could be easily implemented to provide basic, quality health care to an additional 47 million Americans for about $120 billion dollars, which is only 1/5 of the budget expenditure for the military. If we simply pulled our troops out of Iraq we could easily redirect the cost of an expensive, failed war to provide health care for all of our citizens.

Although it is easy to blame the current leadership in Tennessee for the health care crisis that is affecting hundreds of thousands, let us instead direct our attention to a solution which will really meet our needs - a universal single payer health care system. This is truly the best way to address not only the Tenncare crisis and the current round of health care cuts, by doing so we can also address the health care needs of the citizens of an entire nation.

The momentum is building in America for universal health care, now it is time to elect leaders to Washington who will accomplish the job of insuring all Americans.