Congress: don’t pattern federal reform on the FAILED Tennessee Plan!  Several healthcare reform proposals currently being considered are patterned after a Tennessee health care plan (TennCare) which failed…..

“A government-run health insurance plan is enacted on the promise of increasing competition and bringing down costs, but over the years, as more people leave their private insurance to take the “public option,” the cost to operate the government plan skyrockets….

“While supporters of the Tennessee program said it would save money, it wound up eating 38 percent of the state’s budget…As a result of this, insurance rates for those who have private coverage were going through the roof….

“There is no example that you can point to that shows where having private insurance in competition with the public option brings the costs down. It leads to exploding costs….

“They were tired of insurance companies denying people universal access, and thought they could save so much money with a public plan to cover not only the people on Medicaid but all uninsured. Sound familiar?

“Costs began to explode immediately….

“Hospitals were paid about 40 cents on the dollar, which eventually rose to 64 cents, while Tennessee became the number one state in the country for consumption of prescription medications…

“Once people got on TennCare, they wouldn’t get off because it was a better deal [than private insurance]. There were several court cases to get people off the rolls that that didn’t belong.

“…failed TennCare’s commissioner of human services was Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, who has now been appointed by President Obama as director of the White House Office of Health Reform, or health czar…..

“Private firms such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee were contracted to administer the program….

“A state audit in July 1999 reported that the state had spent $6 million to insure 14,000 dead people. Meanwhile, 16,500 enrollees actually lived out of state and 20 percent were found ineligible to be in the program…Once it was moved to more limited benefits, not everybody decided to go into the program…

“The proposed public option at the federal level is designed to lead to a single-payer system—that would just accelerate what has happened in Tennessee once you get a government plan, a monopoly–whether it’s a government or private– [that] would result in higher costs, and the ultimate way for the government to bring down those costs is through rationing.”  

Sources: http://www.cnsnews.com/PUBLIC/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=51238  .  Also see Nat’l Institute of Health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17405578 , http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/bg1357.cfm , http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9016061