{"id":1251,"date":"2006-06-21T20:49:31","date_gmt":"2006-06-21T20:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1251"},"modified":"2006-06-21T20:49:31","modified_gmt":"2006-06-21T20:49:31","slug":"ripple_effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1251","title":{"rendered":"Ripple Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

The massive cuts that Tennessee implemented last year for its TennCare health care program are having detrimental effects on some of the state’s poorest and sickest residents, as illustrated in this NPR profile of one woman who is being forced to choose between medications<\/A> because TennCare will cover only five prescriptions per month.  Her story is heartrending, all the more so because thousands of other Tennesseeans are probably in similar dire straits.  Governor Bredesen, who led the charge to restructure TennCare, defends his actions by emphasizing that he eventually wants to provide a basic level of health coverage for every uninsured resident before focusing on the needs of high-risk populations.  But while Bredesen’s goal of some sort of universal coverage is admirable, I think he needs to recognize that the people with significant disabilities were not the cause of the budget crisis resulting in the TennCare austerity measures.  TennCare was badly mismanaged for years, but the people forced to reckon with the mistakes of politicians and bureaucrats are those people who can least afford to do so. <\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The massive cuts that Tennessee implemented last year for its TennCare health care program are having detrimental effects on some of the state’s poorest and sickest residents, as illustrated in this NPR profile of one woman who is being forced to choose between medications because TennCare will cover only five prescriptions per month.  Her story […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-kb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}