TennCare Director Speaks About Political Difficulties Of Expanding Medicaid
Darin Gordon, in remarks to medical students, points to the state's experience 20 years ago when it tried on its own to expand TennCare. The state found that it could not support the program and scaled it back. Also, Medicaid expansion news from Virginia, New York and Kansas.
The Tennessean:
TennCare Director Tries To Thread Needle On Medicaid Expansion
TennCare Director Darin Gordon gave medical students insight this week on a difficult task — finding a way for Tennessee to benefit from federal tax dollars already being collected from state residents. ... He said the discussions were ongoing, including dialogue this week. But he noted that an expansion would be a hard sell in Tennessee given the state’s experience in the mid-1990s, when it opened up TennCare under “the most ambitious expansion of health insurance the country had ever seen” — a program the state could not financially support and had to scale back. (Wilemon, 11/20)
The Washington Post:
Puckett’s Senate Exit Undid McAuliffe’s Secret Plan For Medicaid Expansion
[Former Virginia State Sen. Phillip P. Puckett's] resignation exacerbated an increasingly partisan atmosphere in Richmond. Its reverberations are likely to make it more difficult for [Gov. Terry] McAuliffe to work with a GOP-controlled legislature to get anything done during the remainder of his term. The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen people and reviewed scores of e-mails and text and voice messages to piece together new details about how Puckett’s resignation unfolded. (Vozzella, 11/22)
The Associated Press:
NY's Poor Gain From Health Insurance Changes
A year into New York's operation of a medical insurance exchange, more than half of the people with new coverage qualified for Medicaid — the federal program for the poor — and many didn't know they were eligible until the push under the Affordable Care Act. Overall, 370,604 people were enrolled with commercial and nonprofit insurers, 525,283 in Medicaid; and 64,875 in the state's Child Health Plus coverage for families with moderate incomes. That's a total of 960,762. (Matthews and Thompson, 11/22)
The Kansas Health Institute News Service:
Voter Opposition To Obamacare Led Dems To Shy Away From Medicaid Expansion
Post-election soul-searching by Kansas Democrats includes disagreement over whether Medicaid expansion should have been a larger part of the party’s strategy. The Democrats lost all statewide races for the second straight time and lost another five House seats to drop their number in that chamber to 27. The defeats were part of a national wave of Republican election wins, but they have nonetheless led to talk within the Kansas Democratic Party about what could have been done differently. (Marso, 11/21)
