It now appears that Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen is on President Obama’s short list to become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services since Tom Daschle has dropped out. This would effectively give him control of what happens in health care in this country. This would be past a tragic mistake.
In the past few years over 250,000 low income working Tennesseans have been dropped from TennCare the state insurance. As bluntly as possible, people have died while Governor Bredesen paid due diligence to his bottom line. Intitially there was a safety net for those who lost their insurance, but that is effectively gone. Another 150,000 are getting ready to lose their TennCare in the next couple of months. In place of this Governor Bredesen has created a program called Cover Tennessee which serves 20,000 people.
In Tennessee it has become for many who are poor and sick a scary time. Governor Bredesen used to run a healthcare company and given the state of the current health care system do we really want to put the fox in charge of the chickens?
There are a lot of qualified people. You need to speak now. The email for the president on this issue is: www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ . Please speak out. As bad as I hate to say it as a resident of Tennessee lets keep Phil Bredesen home.
