Bredesen receives mixed reaction on Medicaid comments

“All of this sounds positive. I haven’t seen the whole plan, so it’s kind of hard to comment,” Ford told the Washington bureau of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, adding that he is fighting the GOP-controlled Congress efforts to “cut” Medicaid.

“I’m a Democrat,” he said. “I’m a Democrat for a reason. I just think people who work deserve health care. … My job is to make sure that this program works.”

Bredesen, who made the comments in the Democrats’ national radio address on Saturday, is in the midst of a political and court battle to revamp TennCare, the state’s $8 billion-plus Medicaid program that now covers some 1.3 million Tennesseans.

In his radio address, Gov. Bredesen called for a program that requires co-payments from enrollees, prioritizes spending on “the most important things first” and excludes funding for new drugs that are only marginally more effective than existing ones.

“Let’s scrap the old, inefficient version of Medicaid that’s led us to spend more and more of our finite resources on a system that never yielded the kind of public health results we’d hoped for,” Bredesen said.

State Sen. Rosalind Kurita, D-Clarksville, who is running for Tennessee’s Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 2006, said she agreed with Bredesen’s call for change.

“The fact is, for states like Tennessee, the program is simply not working,” she said in a statement issued by her campaign. “We need a program that helps America’s poorest citizens with the health care assistance they need while allowing states to balance their budgets.”

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a national advocacy group, said Bredesen was “to the right of most Republicans in this town in terms of wanting to significantly change and destroy the program.”

Medicaid now covers 53 million people “who otherwise would likely be uninsured,” he said.

Bredesen spokeswoman Lydia Lenker said the issue “isn’t about partisan politics for Gov. Bredesen. To him, this is a commonsense approach to solving an all-too-real problem for not just Tennesseans but for all Americans.”