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Corporate Takeover of Tennessee State Government

In 2011, the newly elected GOP super-majority in the Tennessee State Legislature overturned a long standing ban and made it legal for corporations to donate directly to candidates and political parties. What the law did, effectively, was to allow individual corporations to have the same legal status as Political Action Committees, or PACs.

The good folks in the Tennessee General Assembly also raised the amount that any one person could donate to their election campaigns by 40%, they then tied that amount to inflation so that it will automatically increase over time.

Another bill that thankfully failed that year would have allowed corporations to make donations during the legislative session, effectively legalizing bribery.

All these changes to state law were direct effects of recent Supreme Court rulings. Corporations can donate like individuals because, well, under the law they are persons ("corporations are people, my friend"). And of course, money is not money, it is "free speech" according to the United States Supreme Court. As Representative Glen Casada was reported as saying (gleefully, I imagine), "More money is more free speech."

This legislation is just another piece of the broader pattern of the complete corporate domination of our elected government. It is the golden rule of Tennessee politics, those who have the gold make the rules. And those with the gold are using it in record numbers.

Humphrey on the Hill has just reported that Tennessee political action committees broke all records last year both in the number of contributions made and the amounts given:

A total of 611 PACs registered to donate to Tennessee's state-level campaigns for 2012 and gave a total of $8,185,652 in contributions, almost all to candidates running for the state Legislature, the Registry said in its annual report. 

The PACs spent another $2,003,603 in "independent expenditures," which do not go directly to a campaign but are spent independently to help elect or defeat a legislative candidate. Typically, most is money spent on attack advertising.

And the Registry of Election Finance has reported that "the number of registered PACs has increased almost 50 percent in the last 10 years".

The Tennessee General Assembly came just two-votes shy of passing an "honor system" bill that would have overturned current laws that require corporations to directly disclose their contributions and would instead place the responsibility solely on politicians. Representative Casada reasoned that since human people do not have to file disclosures when they donate to campaigns, why should corporate "people"? He said that making corporate campaign contributions voluntary was not inviting corruption, but "increasing free speech".

I can understand how an "honor system" would streamline our pay-to-play political process for folks like Casada. All that free speech is hard to count, as the Knoxville News Sentinel recently reported, more than 50 candidates running for elected office in the state of Tennessee have failed to report 181 PAC and corporate contributions, for an amount totaling $145,875. The un-bribeable Casada failed to report $2,000 in "speech" to the State Registry of Election Finance.

Casada, the ever vigilant protector of the rights of corporate "people" has vowed to bring the corporate campaign contribution "honor system" law up again next year.

Everyone in Tennessee should be deeply worried about the obvious and intentional corruption of our state government by private, corporate interests. Elected officials in our state are attempting to privatize our public schools, gutting worker protections, reinforcing the cradle-to-prison pipeline, destroying our environment, and systematically attacking poor and working class people.

With all this "free speech" in Tennessee it is pretty evident who does NOT have a voice in the Tennessee Legislature - everyday people who are struggling just to get by.

Naming the Disease: Capitalism, Kids for Cash, and Dr. King

Former Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced this week to 28 years in federal prison for his part in the now infamous "Kids for Cash" scheme that sentenced thousands of juveniles to private prisons in exchange for kickbacks. Many of the juveniles, some as young as 10, were sent to the lock-up by Former Judge Ciavarella for petty and trivial offenses. In exchange, Ciavarella received over $1 million in bribes from the builder of private, for-profit juvenile detention facilities. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already reviewed and thrown out thousands of these convictions, ruling that former Judge Ciavarella violated the Constitutional rights of these children, "including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea."

DemocracyNow! report on the "Kids for Cash" scandal

"Kids for cash" is absolutely right. Private, for-profit prisons work in the exact same manner as a private, for-profit hotel: profits are maximized with every jail cell bed filled. And private prisons, just like every other private, for-profit corporations, has only one purpose: to maximize profits.

This is what happens. This is privatization. This is the logic of a system that is centrally organized around the pursuit of private wealth. This is the logic of a system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold on the market: education, healthcare, national "defense", even our rights under the judicial system.

This is the collapsing of the garment factory in Bangladesh that took the lives of over 1,127 workers. This is the ExxonMobil pipeline that recently burst and flooded thousands upon thousands of crude oil into the town of Mayflower, Arkansas.This is the West Fertilizer Co. that had stored 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate allowable by law without triggering government regulatory oversight when it exploded, killing 14 workers and turning part of a small Texas town into scorched refuse. This is the corporate education reform movement that is spending huge amounts of money to systematically transform our public schools into publicly financed, privately managed companies. This is the 45,000 people that die in the United States every year, one person every 12 minutes, because they can not afford health insurance.

This struggle is not new. One of our country's greatest socialists, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., preached about the dangers of capitalism and how it was deeply integrated with other forms of oppression, namely our country's long legacy of white supremacy and imperialism:

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. King's idea of revolution was simple in theory: we must re-evaluate our values. We must learn to see people not as commodities, but as precious souls endowed with universal worth. We must not see the Earth as a commodity to be used and discarded, but as the source from which life itself flows. We must see peace not as the result of military strength, but as the process of building deep bonds of human connection based on integrity, mutual respect, and love. Dr. King's idea of revolution might be simple in theory, but it is very difficult in practice. Not just because we are all deeply flawed and living in a rotten culture, but because to act earnestly on these very values is a self-marginalizing act, one that will not only put us at the end of a joke or a vindictive byline, but at the end of a police officer's baton and a turning jail cell key.

But we don't have to get to that point over night. Dr. King sure didn't. A good place to start dealing with the sickness is to become comfortable with naming the disease. The system is not broke, it was made this way. And that system is capitalism. Finding the strength to publicly bear  witness to the violence of a system that allows a few to live as gods while the great many live in hell is a first step in a long road towards a new future.

Immigration & TennCare: Democrats Respond

Earlier this week I wrote a deeply critical post calling out the Chattanooga Times Free Press for an article that I believe was provoking anti-immigrant sentiments and utterly failing to be conscious of the ethnocentric, nativist assumptions the paper was promoting - such as their assumption that immigrants living in poverty in our state do not count at "Tennessee's poorest residents" and, apparently, are not really "Tennesseans" at all. I saw these assumptions as being the basis for pitting poor and working people against immigrants. [There is a very real context in which these kinds of articles must be read, one in which Coffee County Commissioners appear to support killing Muslims, Tennessee lawmakers raised a roar about a "Muslim foot bath" that turned out to be a mop-sink, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented "enormous growth" of white supremacist hate groups in the Southern region and Tennessee specifically]

The sensationalized controversy in the article centered around this: if Governor Haslam refuses to accept federal funding for the expansions of Medicaid (TennCare), as he has pledged to do unless he can voucherize the program, then hundreds-of-thousands of poor and working class people living in Tennessee will not have access to this desperately needed government healthcare program, while, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, "legal immigrants with incomes below 100 percent of the poverty level -- $11,170 for a single person or $23,050 for a family of four -- will be eligible for federal subsidies to buy private coverage through health insurance exchanges" due to a specific provision for immigrants in the Affordable Care Act.

In my blog post I also publicly called-out the Tennessee Democratic Party for their quote in the paper, which I saw as an attempt to appeal to white nativist pride in an attempt to attack the Governor.

Since then several Democrats that I respect have reached out to me to discuss the issues that I brought up and I thought it only fair to provide space for them to publicly respond. The first response is an exact posting of the Facebook conversation I had with Democratic party activist Frank Eaton, who ran a courageous campaign against Republican Rep. Richard Floyd for the 27th Legislative District in 2012. The second response is from Brandon Puttbrese, spokesman for the Tennessee Democratic Party who was quoted in the article.

Conversation with Frank Eaton,May 5 2013:
Frank Eaton: So your takeaway is that the Democrats and Republicans are no different? The Tennessee Democratic Party has urged expansion of Medicaid on behalf of Tennessee's poorest citizens for months. Far from merely an "ideological battle," the governor's decision places some of Tennessee's poorest citizens in a struggle for health, and at times literally for their lives. The fact that legal immigrants stand to enjoy health coverage where native Tennessee citizens won't has nothing to do with Democrats and everything to do with a Republican governor and Republican legislators' extremist policies in action. Our Republican governor would choose poverty and sickness for poor citizens over compromise and cooperation with a Democratic president. It is not the fault of Tennessee Democrats for pointing out that unfairness. Tennessee Democrats supported Medicaid expansion, which would ensure coverage for all Tennesseans. That's 180 degrees of difference.

Chris Brooks: Frank Eaton, with all due respect, the Affordable Care Act is basically the equivalent of the bank bailout for the medical insurance corporate cartel that wrote the legislation behind closed doors in the White House (this is well documented by the press). Obama agreed to take the public option off the table, even though we had the votes. My guess is that he saw these series of political calculations as being "realistic".
The only piece of the legislation that was in any sense progressive was the expansion of Medicaid. Haslam is definitively holding poor and working people hostage in his attempt to privatize the program - he knows that if he accepts the money outright he will have a war on his hand by the extreme right-wing of his party, which will probably "primary" him (more of that "political reality"). What's ironic, is that his plan to use the money to subsidize purchases on the "healthcare exchanges" (and thus "voucherize" the program) is really just an extension of the core of Obama's legislation. No real economic difference there, just rhetorical window dressing.
Lastly, if you look at what I say about the Tennessee Democratic Party in the post, I am clearly pointing out that the carefully crafted talking point they gave the press is an obvious attempt to appeal to white nativist pride in the hopes of scoring easy points against the Governor. The TNDP should be called out and criticized for that. They should stick to the issue, and talk about the hundreds-of-thousands of poor and working people affected by this legislation and the thousands of workers in the healthcare industry projected to lose their jobs if the money is not taken.
Lastly, I can hold both these beliefs at the same time, without contradiction: there are amazing progressive freedom fighters in the Democratic Party both nationally and in Tennessee - but there is really only one political party in the United States, the Corporate Party, with a left and a right wing (the Democrats and the Republicans). My points about the shared economic assumptions underpinning both Haslam and Obama has more to do with how far one can rise in the respective parties given the pro-corporate political views and policy agendas of the candidates.

Frank Eaton: The subject of the tfp article was that experts have said the failure to expand Medicaid would result in legal immigrants being covered when poor native Tennesseans would not. Tennessee Democrats support Medicaid expansion so statements condemning Haslam's inaction shouldn't surprise anyone. Maybe Mr. Puttbrese could have just called it ironic, but the factual basis remains. Here's how others put it:
"The prospect that legal immigrants, such as workers and refugees, will be insured but not the state's poorest residents is "quite an irony," said Ron Pollack, executive director of the Washington-based health advocacy group Families USA.
He said Arizona's Republican governor, Jan Brewer, cited that fact among others when she recommended her state expand Medicaid.
Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said the Supreme Court ruling sets up a political dilemma.
"If you're a state that doesn't do the expansion, there will be two groups of people below 100 percent of the poverty level: citizens, who will likely get nothing, [and] legal immigrants, who get fully subsidized coverage in the exchange. ... That's not going to sit well with folks."http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/may/05/health-reform-aids-legal-immigrants-stiffs/?politics

Chris Brooks: The point of the matter is that the TNDP's official position is to use racist nativist rhetoric to attack the Governor over the matter:
"The consequences of Governor Haslam's do-nothing leadership are that foreign-born immigrants pursuing the American Dream will have a leg up on born-and-bred Tennesseans," [State Democratic Party spokesman Brandon Puttbrese] added.
Moral consistency demands that we criticize anyone who uses racism and ethnocentricism as a political ploy and that we work for true healthcare for all - including migrants, who are a part of our community. In the community I am working to build, we honor and respect our differences, we don't use them to foment division and push agendas.

Frank Eaton: I don't really think it's Democrats whose policies throw immigrants under the bus, Chris. If you're talking about party corruption I'd join you in saying both parties have their share of it. I just think the party that supports Medicaid expansion has the right to expose the hypocrisy of a Republican governor who ran in support of Arizona's immigration law (you know, the one that allowed racial profiling?), and Haslam's intransigence has resulted in lack of healthcare for poor Tennessee natives while legal immigrants would be covered. That is ironic, but pointing out the irony doesn't insult immigrants, it insults GOP policies that got us to this point.

Chris Brooks: The TNDP did not call it ironic. They acted indignant. I guess where I see the TNDP playing to the lowest denominator you just see them as making a valid claim. Again, I can see how both sides consistently attack marginalized communities to their benefit. Just because one is worse than the other does not mean that they should not both be called out.

Frank Eaton: Chris I do see your point about the language. "Born n bred Tennesseans" and "foreign born immigrants" sounds like an appeal to something we need to move beyond in this country. Not many of us are true native Americans and we could all stand to be reminded of our collective status as immigrants. Your linguistic point is well-taken. However, I will probably always disagree with statements that ignore the differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats. If you remove personal and systemic flaws, Democrats stand for equal opportunity for all. Issues affecting the working poor should be ours to embrace.

Response from Brandon Puttbrese, May 7 2013:

Thanks again for the opportunity --   

First off, the Affordable Care Act, health care and immigration reform are complex issues, and any time writers boil down conversations to a sentence or two -- some pieces are always missing. So let me expand -- 

At our core, we are a country that celebrates our diversity. America is a nation of immigrants who have come here generation after generation for opportunity and their own American Dream. We don't begrudge people who work hard to better themselves and their families. Quite the opposite, immigrants in America over the years have innovated new ideas and helped improve our economy in countless ways. 

There is no doubt the current immigration system is broken and the time has come to pass common sense immigration reform that treats immigrants and their families with humanity and respect and helps grow our economy; measures to streamline legal immigration and create a responsible pathway for earning citizenship among them. 

That's fair. 

Now Gov. Haslam's decision to block federally funded Medicaid expansion is objectively unfair to current Tennessee citizens. The direct consequence of Haslam's inaction is that some taxpaying Tennesseans will NOT get access to health care while some legal immigrants working in Tennessee, under the Affordable Care Act, will. 

But it is not a question of whether this group or that group should have health coverage. If you're working hard in Tennessee and playing by the rules, your family should have access to a doctor -- not just emergency rooms -- and reliable health coverage. That's essential to promoting financial security and dignity for working families and building a stronger middle class. (It's not only fair, it's also a smart economic decision, but I digress.) 

Haslam's rejection of Medicaid instead creates a second class doughnut hole -- where health coverage now becomes nonexistent for 300,000 low-income Tennesseans. That is shameful and unfair. It's not the American way to create a second class of people -- on immigration or health care. 

Thanks again for the opportunity to respond.
-BJP

Chattanooga Times Free Press Propaganda: Divide & Conquer in the Battle Over TennCare

Andy Sher's article in the paper today about Haslam's refusal to accept federal funding for the expansions of Medicaid (TennCare) unless he can voucherize it - that is, unless the Governor can use public money to purchase health coverage from private medical insurance corporations through Obama's "healthcare exchanges" rather than have the state pay the health care providers themselves - is using the old tactic of divide and conquer to attack Haslam on the issue.

The main point of the article is to foment division between migrants and those born in the United States. Just look at the lead sentence:

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam's refusal so far to expand Medicaid under federal health reform could mean that Tennessee's poorest residents won't have access to health coverage in 2014 but some lawful immigrants will, experts say.

Under the Affordable Care Act, migrants living in poverty in the United States would be eligible for subsidies in purchasing healthcare coverage from the healthcare exchanges. So, even though you live in Tennessee and live in poverty, according to Sher's article you don't really count as being among "Tennessee's poorest residents". This false divide is brought up several times in the article. Sher even  pits "Tennessee residents" against "refugees", many of whom are probably permanently resettled to the United States and live very difficult lives.

By directly saying that migrants living in our state don't count as "Tennesseans", even though they live and work here and are themselves living in poverty and are in need of healthcare coverage just like everyone else, Sher is using his pen to introduce ethnocentric and racist hate into a battle that should be focused on the preciousness of all human beings and the basic human right we all have to quality medical assistance, regardless of nationality or ethnicity or race.

And the Tennessee Democratic Party is more than willing to jump in the gutter and appeal to white nativist pride in the hopes of scoring easy points against the Governor:

"The consequences of Governor Haslam's do-nothing leadership are that foreign-born immigrants pursuing the American Dream will have a leg up on born-and-bred Tennesseans," [State Democratic Party spokesman Brandon Puttbrese] added.

Haslam should be deeply criticized and publicly called to account. He is playing chicken with the Federal government, using the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of working poor Tennesseans desperate for medical coverage as hostages in his attempt to get the federal government to allow him to privatize TennCare. Haslam's decision to not accept the money to expand the program unless he can privatize it, is a direct result of his putting politics and profits over the real needs of poor and working people - and we should call him out.

We should also be deeply critical of President Obama, whose signature legislation is based on "healthcare exchanges", which are really nothing but a vast national voucher program, effectively ensuring the transfer of billions of public-taxpayer dollars to private insurance corporations every year.

The take away: there is no real difference between the economic approaches of Republicans and Democrats, they both believe in privatization and using the resources of the Federal government to subsidize and protect the private interests of corporations. We should be  working together to build a mass-movement for all people and their right to a quality education, healthcare and housing regardless of nationality or ethnicity or race - and we can't allow the media or the political party partisans to divide us in our struggles.

Moral Failure:George W. Bush Is A Nationally Celebrated War Criminal

Today, the corporate media celebrated a man who has been proven by history to be a war criminal. President George W. Bush presided over an international program of kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention. He, his administration and the criminals at the Pentagon engaged in an intentional propaganda campaign to mislead the American people into an illegal and immoral imperial war for oil and global power that has left hundreds-of-thousands of innocent men, women and children dead and wounded and has cost us (and generations to come) trillions of dollars. The fact that we would celebrate this man and his legacy with ornate buildings and public events is a testament to the deep state of moral and spiritual decline in the United States. It is also a very real and tangible testament to the power of the ruling elite to render themselves complete immune from any degree of public accountability for their actions.

Definitive torture
In the last month, the Guardian reported that "a 580-page report published by the Constitution Project, a non-partisan Washington-based think-tank," had concluded that the kidnapping-torture program developed and implemented during the Bush/Cheney junta was "unjustified and counterproductive, damaging to the country's reputation, and has placed US military personnel at risk of mistreatment if they are themselves taken prisoner" - and that the country's highest officials were responsible, including President George W. Bush.
The New York Times praised the report, calling it "the fullest independent effort so far to assess the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons". The NYT also reported that the task force was "led by two former congressmen — Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, who served in the Bush administration as under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and James Jones, a Democrat, who was an ambassador to Mexico during the Clinton years" and was "informed by interviews with dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as with former prisoners."

Propaganda and lies used to justify an illegal and immoral imperial war for oil & power
On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, the editors at CNN wrote an editorial flatly stating that "the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil". They also stated that the war had "losers", namely "the Iraqi people and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead."
It only took CNN ten years to report what most of us knew when it was happening, but I guess it is better late than never.
What CNN has still failed to report is that in 2009, New York Times reporter David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for his expose on how the Pentagon engaged in a very intentional (and illegal) "propaganda campaign to recruit more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as military analysts ahead of and during the Iraq war." Barstow's report proves that the US government knew the war was bullshit, so they had to fool the American people into going along with the plan to spill blood for oil - and they used the corporate media lap dog to get the job done.

Celebrating war criminals: A national past-time
Today, our national media gleefully sat by and cheered as four previous presidents and our current President, Barack Obama, attended the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Healthcare Battle In Tennessee: The Choice of People or Profits

Twice a year, Tennesseans who are otherwise ineligible from our state's medical insurance program for poor and working people, but are none-the-less desperate for a chance to get help, are given an opportunity to call a state hotline and receive an application that would otherwise be out of reach.

As the New York Times reported:

the window is tight — the line shuts down after 2,500 calls, typically within an hour — and the demand is so high that it is difficult to get through. 

There are other hurdles, too. Applicants have to be elderly, blind, disabled or the “caretaker relative” of a child who qualifies for Medicaid, known here as TennCare. Their medical debt has to be high enough that if they paid it, their income would fall below a certain threshold. Not many people end up qualifying, but that does not stop thousands from trying. LINK

This "healthcare lottery" sets the maximum number of calls at 2,500 - a feat accomplished within 50 minutes of the hotline being accessible. The fact that thousands of people from all over our state are calling a hotline and reach the maximum number of calls in less than an hour is a stark example of just how desperate poor and working people in Tennessee are for access to state-provided medical insurance for their healthcare needs.

This situation is even more tragic in light of Governor Haslam's recent decision to not accept billions of dollars in federal aid to expand our state's Medicaid program, better known as "TennCare". Currently, over a million people in the state of Tennessee (which has a population of about 6.4 million) are covered under this program, more than half of these recipients are children.

The "healthcare lottery" and Governor Haslam's decision did not go unnoticed, and Tennessee's elected officials once again found themselves on the receiving end of the Colbert treatment:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the Affordable Care Act in 2012, they upheld many parts of the law, such as the individual health insurance mandate, but one central piece was altered - the expansion of Medicaid, which was now declared to be voluntary and to be decided on a state-by-state basis. The stated intention of the Affordable Care Act, which was written behind closed doors in the White House by Pharmaceutical and Medical Insurance lobbyists (see here, here, and here), was to approach universal healthcare coverage through the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of "health insurance exchanges", which are online marketplaces through which healthcare consumers purchase plans from private corporations - or else, pay a hefty fine from the government for going uninsured.

The only true step towards universal (single-payer) healthcare coverage was the expansion of Medicaid and that is precisely why it has come under attack.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, states across the United States are being asked to expand their Medicaid programs up to 133% of the federal poverty line ($14,856 in 2012) and to work with the federal government to increase the funding available to poor and working people who are currently uninsured but would be eligible under the raised poverty line. One report estimated that if every state chose to expand Medicaid, this would result in 21.3 million more Americans being provided with healthcare coverage nationally by 2022 (for a total of about 30 million people).

In Tennessee, the New York Times has reported that accepting the expansion "would add more than 180,000 people to the TennCare rolls by 2019". Though, a University of Memphis study released in January, 2012 estimates that up to 224,994 people who had previously been ineligible for TennCare (mostly because they are working poor whose incomes are above the federal limit or are without children or are not disabled) would be covered under the expansion. LINK

Some US Governors (predictably, most are Republican) are putting up a fight. The major claim being floated is, of course, that the states "could not afford" the expansion, that it would be "fiscally irresponsible  and that the priority should be on "deficit reduction".

Under the Affordable Care Act,  all states that accept Federal money for the expansion of Medicaid would, within a few years, be responsible for paying for a small share of the costs - up to a maximum of 10% of total program funding beginning in 2019.

The grassroots coalition,  "Expanding Medicaid for a Healthy Tennessee", explains the implementation of state responsibility for a small share of the cost of TennCare like this:

The federal government pays for all of the cost for those who are newly eligible in 2014-2016. Starting in 2017 the federal share gradually drops, and the state has to start paying a small share that rises over several years to 10%. After 2019, the federal share reaches and remains at 90%, and the state share is 10%. LINK

Haslam did not reject the Federal money outright, but instead attempted to push through a "third-way" - based on his current attempts to privatize public education - he asked that the Federal government allow the state of Tennessee to "voucherize" health insurance. The idea is this, instead of having an efficient public program to pay hospitals for the medical care that poor and working people need, the money would instead be given to for-profit, private insurance companies that would then do what they do - reduce costs by attempting to deny or limit coverage in every conceivable way.

When officials in the US Government's Office of Health and Human Services did not give Haslam a clear answer on the legality of his "Tennessee Plan", he walked from the table - leaving on it the $1 billion in federal dollars, the hundreds-of-thousands of working poor Tennesseans desperate for coverage, and the services and jobs of thousands of healthcare providers in Tennessee. LINK

Brad Palmtree, the interim Executive Director of the Tennessee Health Care Campaign, a non-profit healthcare advocacy group, expressed deep disappointment in a prepared press release:

"Governor Haslam had the opportunity to show real leadership for the people of Tennessee. We all know that those who need insurance the most are usually the ones who cannot afford it. Because of his decision, there will still be hundreds of thousands of uninsured Tennesseans. These will be children who will go without needed vaccinations, baby boomers who will continue to put off needed care, and individuals living with disabilities without needed aids." LINK

Palmtree was also deeply critical of how the Governor's plan to privatize TennCare - and therefore place our state's medical insurance program for poor and working people into the hands of for-profit corporations - would inevitably lead to profit being placed before people:

“That because private insurance companies have shareholders they have to please by making sure there’s a return on their investments, so they put their own profits ahead of consumers’ health care needs,” Palmertree added. “What I’m afraid of is what’s the governor is proposing is going to actually increase the costs of providing care to low-income individuals and families statewide.” LINK

Palmtree was not alone. For months, the Tennessee Hospital Association had been relentlessly lobbying our state legislature, attempting to explain the incredible economic impact the decision to not expand TennCare would have on them.

As part of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the United States Congress decided to defray the costs of expanding Medicaid across the states by dramatically reducing federal reimbursements of costs absorbed by hospitals when folks who receive medical attention cannot pay:

To help fund the Affordable Care Act, Congress decided it would slash reimbursements to hospitals known as disproportionate service payments — essentially paybacks for providing care to the poor. The payments, which total more than $11 billion a year nationwide, will be cut by nearly three-quarters in 2014, when the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate goes into effect. LINK

That means that the cost of paying for uninsured healthcare, which hospitals are required by law to give, will be passed down to the hospitals which will then receive dramatically reduced reimbursements from the Federal and state governments for all those unpaid medical bills. Again, according to researchers at "Expanding Medicaid for a Healthy Tennessee":

If the state does not accept the federal funds to provide health coverage to working families through the Health Care Expansion, there will be no way for hospitals to make up for the cuts. 54 of the state’s 120 hospitals will go into the red. They will have to reduce staff and services, and many will close. That will mean the loss of jobs and reduced health services across Tennessee. LINK

The Tennessee Hospital Association has estimated that Governor Haslam, by denying federal funding to expand our state's Medicaid program, will cost Hamilton County alone 7,500 jobs and $1.1 billion, as reported by the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

An Alternate Vision

On the same exact day that Haslam was unveiling his plan for privatizing TennCare, Perrin Lance, the Executive Director of Chattanooga Organized for Action, was being given the "Public Citizen of the Year" award by the Tennessee branch of the National Association of Social Workers.

Perrin's work in the community is exemplary. He spends everyday working with our most vulnerable populations to build a movement for social justice that puts their creativity, expertise and knowledge at its center. As an organizer, he knows that there is no necessity to history, that it can be changed at any time in many ways through the decisions that we all make. That is the power of the choice. The choices that we all make every day, to accept the world around us, or to work together to change it. The social justice work of Chattanooga Organized for Action, like that of many amazing organizations and groups across the state of Tennessee, has a clear message: another world is possible, and we plan to make it real.

When we compare the work of people like Perrin Lance to that of Governor Haslam, that choice is placed in stark contrast: people or profits?

This is the speech given by Perrin Lance when he was awarded the 2013 "Public Citizen of the Year" Award by the Tennessee branch of the National Association of Social Workers at their luncheon and lobby day in Nashville last month:

Social work is hard work.

We all know it. But its hard in a different way from most professions. We’re not doctors, who valiantly struggle against the inevitability of sickness and death. We’re not lawyers, who struggle through the inevitability of conflict and mediate it out. We’re social workers… and the things we struggle against, poverty, homelessness, a lack of healthcare coverage and its consequences… all of these things we struggle against are quite needless.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of the death camps in World War II, wrote that human beings can handle almost any suffering… but needless suffering. Needless suffering is another question.

Suffering that is supposed to come, suffering that is inevitable, can be dealt with. Death, the loss of loved ones, sickness. These are things that come and go. They have a context. We accept them because that’s a part of life. We make sense of them and move on, and this making sense of the inevitable becomes part and pattern of the rich fabric of our human traditions.

But how do you make sense of poverty?
How do you make sense of homelessness?
How do you tell you a single mother from the rural counties of Tennessee that can’t get enough food stamps to afford healthy food for her children that her suffering makes sense?
How do you tell a convicted felon that, despite their having served their time and paid their debts to society, that they’re excluded from the job market, from the opportunities to make their lives better?
How do you tell teachers that despite all their hard work at providing our children an education, that they deserve even less funding for their schools and even less freedom in their classrooms?
How do you tell our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters that they do not have the dignity to enjoy the same rights and privileges that heterosexual couples enjoy?
How do you tell our transgendered brothers and sisters that they cannot choose the very identities that make up the core of their being?
How do you tell immigrants that despite all their contributions to our society, they do not deserve to call our state of Tennessee home, how do we tell them they are not to be recognized as a fellow citizen?
How do you tell the uninsured that covering their basic medical expenses is too costly? Why do we let each other go sick?

Social workers… what do you tell them?
Representatives and Senators… what do you tell them?
Students, teachers... what do you tell them?

Do we tell them it is their fault?
Do we tell them this kind of suffering is inevitable?
Do we tell them that this is their lot?

Or do we tell them the truth?

Do we tell them that we allow poverty?
Do we tell them that we allow hunger and sickness?
Do we tell them that we choose these sins of social conscience?

And do we dare tell them that we can choose different?

Social workers… what do you choose? Do you choose to work for justice? To fight against the policies that cause such suffering?


Representatives and senators, what do you choose? Do you choose to lighten their load, do you choose to ease the paths towards a fulfilled life for the people whom we serve?


Students… what do you choose? Do you choose to use the energy and enthusiaism of your calling to not rest until the world no longer knows the tragedy of needless suffering.

You can.
We can
Because we know that they can.

And what is our mission, as social workers, in this hardest of work?

I like to think of The Lord of the Rings, the third movie, when Frodo, carrying the Ring to Mt. Doom and his Fate, finally collapses with the goal just a few feet in sight. His faithful friend, Sam, comes to his aid. And he says: “I can’t carry the Ring for you…but I can carry you.” And he does.

We can’t make sense of a world of needless suffering because a world of needless suffering doesn’t make sense. There’s no need for it. But only the people whom we work for, the poor and oppressed, are the ones who can bring this world to be.

So what do we do?

We help them carry that weight.
In love and solidarity, we help them carry that weight.

Perrin Lance
Executive Director, Chattanooga Organized for Action