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Largest Public Health Cutback in United States History

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Here in Eastern Iowa, the Health Care forum of Progressive Action for the Common Good will hold a candlelight vigil and bell ringing at 8:30pm on Sunday, July 31st, at the Unitarian Church, 3707 Eastern Avenue, in Davenport. The vigil will also be preceded at 7:30 by the showing of the documentary, “323,000.” The ringing of the bells will represent the 99 counties in Iowa as a way of showing support and solidarity with the people of Tennessee and the 719,000 TennCare enrollees affected by the cuts.

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Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is executing the cruelest and largest cutback of public health coverage in the history of the United States. Every day, nearly 2,000 people enrolled in TennCare, the State Medicaid program, are receiving letters of termination or reduction of benefits. Hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans, many of whom are chronically ill and disabled, are living in fear because of Governor Bredesen’s decision to strip them of the only health care they have. Now, more than ever, they need your help.

Unfortunately, the national media has done very little to address this issue even though many people stand to lose their lives as a result of these drastic and unnecessary cuts. To make matters worse, internal State memos and documents, obtained by the Tennessee Justice Center, reveal that the State had orchestrated and implemented these cuts merely as a political strategy, with no regard for the consequences they are having on people's lives. The Tennessee Justice Center is a non profit, non-partisan law office. TJC represents low income families, and all of their clients are on TennCare.

The documentary, “323,000,” is the culmination of a 6-month investigation into the largest health care cuts in the history of this country. In the course of the investigations, documents were discovered that definitely prove that Governor Bredesen did not tell the truth to the citizens of Tennessee when he said the reason for the drastic cuts were the fault of the Tennessee Justice Center and other TennCare advocates. In fact, as you will learn below, the cuts are part of a bigger political strategy.

In 2002, Governor Bredesen campaigned on a platform to reform TennCare. In a printed press interview, he cited one of the problems with the program was due to the fact that the MCO’s (Managed Care Organizations) were overpaid and not bearing any of the risk or properly managing care.