On Thursday morning in Nashville’s Centennial Park, we stood alongside Tennessee health advocates and public officials pushing for health care reform – right beside a life-sized replica of the Parthenon.

Health care advocates seem to be a pretty battle-hardened bunch in general, but you got the sense that the group gathered near the faux Parthenon in downtown Nashville on Thursday really have been through it all. Over 10 years ago, the Volunteer State lived up to its name when it announced a program to cover its uninsured residents. TennCare, an expanded Medicaid program was established in 1994 to reduce the number of uninsured. Covering three million residents, it was considered the most ambitious government health plan in the country.

But a decade later, state leaders threatened to cut the program due to rising costs. In an effort to stop these cuts, advocates held a candlelight vigil every night from late June to Labor Day at the Capital building in Nashville. Amidst these protests, the Governor in 2005 slashed the program and over 200,000 residents were cut off and others severely underserved. The Tennessee Health Care Campaign now estimates that about a million people are now uninsured. The largest portion of uninsured adults worked more than 40 hours a week.

A few years ago, a reporter formerly with Consumers Union interviewed some Tennessee residents to gauge the affect of these drastic cuts:

“As I listened to those who no longer had health insurance, their stories were wrenching. One woman told me she was lucky to have breast cancer because that meant she could stay on TennCare. Even so, the state's new limits on prescription drug coverage forced her to choose which of three other life-threatening diseases she would treat. There was another woman who told me about a mole growing near her eye. She said that no doctor would remove it because she lacked insurance and did not have the money to pay for surgery.”

It’s not gotten better. On Thursday we talked to Molly, an independent writer and filmmaker who produced a documentary on TennCare. She was covered only for catastrophic incidents when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer last year and then had to undergo three surgeries and six months of chemotherapy. All of a sudden, Molly found herself in the same boat as many of the people she profiled in her documentary, when her inadequate coverage forced her to pay about $25,000 out of pocket.

Yet through years of struggle and heartbreak, there’s no sign the advocates here are giving up on reform.

“People who work for a living ought to be able to take their kids to the doctor without having to mortgage the family home” Susan McKay from the Tennessee Health Care Campaign told us. “And nobody should be denied care and dumped in a bunker simply because they are sick and poor.”

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comments (2)

Comments

1 Posted by Annie Gourieux at 06/27/08 07:53 PM

It took four years for Tenncare to decide my husband did not owe a hospital $34,000.

2 Posted by Colleen at 09/02/08 09:25 PM

This month's issue of Spirituality & Health has a wonderful feature about the difference between "Healthcare" and "Healthcaring", on page 25. It puts a most important spiritual aspect to this issue. It is written by James Duffy, M.D., director of the Institute for Religion and Health at the Texas Medical Center.

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