Yahoo! News - Tenn. Drops 323,000 Adults From Medicaid
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Gov. Phil Bredesen announced Monday that he will drop 323,000 adults from the state's expanded Medicaid program to save about $1.7 billion a year, but will preserve health coverage for children.

The announcement capped weeks of negotiations between Bredesen and health care advocates in an effort to save a Tennessee program that offers coverage to the working poor who make too much money to qualify for regular Medicaid.

Advocates said the cuts would be devastating and pleaded with the governor to reconsider the move.

The governor's plan ends coverage for adults who make more than the Medicaid cutoff, but retains it for more than 100,000 children whose families fall in that range.

"I say to you with a clear heart that I've tried everything," the Democratic governor said. "There is no big lump of federal money that will make the problem go away. It is just not there."

And what will happen is this- those people will wait until their condition becomes emergent, they will flood the emergency rooms, which in turn will raise costs for hospitals, which will then turn and raise prices to insurance companies, which will raise insurance rates, which will push more people off of private insurance and into the emergency rooms. Can't anyone see the cycle? Hello?

Nah. Better get to work on tort reform. That will fix it.

Better yet, let's blame the patients for needing health care in the first place, as this local forum did. Perhaps we should just deny health care to those that smoke, or are obese (hey, that's 60% of the population right there!) or whatever we can proclaim to be "their fault". That way the insurance companies can continue to make record profits and only treat healthy people!

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Nobody is addressing this problem in a realistic way.