Health Care Safety Net to provide insulin for a while

“Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with health-care providers and advocates to identify the most critical issues with the current TennCare reforms, and one of those areas was insulin services,” said Bredesen, who’s partnering with the Tennessee Chapter of the National Kidney Foundation.

“It is important that we provide more time for these Tennesseans to find alternative resources,” he said.

The program will provide four months of coverage for those who need insulin beginning sometime in the next two weeks.

The announcement is the second this week concerning the special program Bredesen set up to provide a soft landing for the roughly 190,000 adults being disenrolled from the public health care program.

On Wednesday, the governor said he’s reached an agreement with the Tennessee Pharmacists Association and the Tennessee Retail Association that will allow local pharmacies to provide free generic drugs to those people being cut.

Bredesen has said he’s making cuts and reducing benefits because the state cannot afford the $8.7 billion program in its current form.

Earlier this week, he said he’ll be able to keep about 97,000 of the sickest enrollees on the program because of modifications a federal judge is allowing him to make to an agreement the state made with legal advocates for TennCare patients in 1999.