Tennessee Aims to Become Pioneer in Cutting Health Spending on the Poor, Children
The radical Republican plan to gut Medicaid as we know it is alive and well in the state of Tennessee.
Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, unveiled on Tuesday a plan to make his state the first in the nation to overhaul its Medicaid system into a so-called block grant program. Going back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, transforming Medicaid — the Great Society initiative to provide suitable health care for the young and the poor — into a block-grant model has long been a dream of the conservative right as a way to remove power from the federal government and shift it to the states.
Generally speaking, block granting works like this: Instead of the federal government covering a portion of a state’s health-care costs for eligible people, the state would take an upfront chunk of money from Washington and then choose to spend it in whatever way it chose to. A block-grant plan would also let a state off the hook for providing the core health-care services to some of the required types of patients that come with receiving Medicaid funds. Unlike the strictest version of block-grant plans, Tennessee’s program would includes provisions that would give the state some extra money if the Medicaid rolls expand.
The plan, called TennCare, requires approval from the federal government, leaving the fate of health care for poor Tennessee residents in the hands of Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Department.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tennessee-medicaid-plan-poor-886201/
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