Political Quotes

“Now, if the gentleman will yield, I'll go to Dr. DesJarlais who joined us, who although he has a French last name and you would think he is from Louisiana is actually from Tennessee. Now, Dr. DesJarlais, obviously, to you and me, but perhaps not to those who are listening, Tennessee experimented with using Medicaid as a safety net program back in the nineties and, if you will, extended it to many others. If I can yield to you, please, could you please comment as to the results of that. Mr. DesJARLAIS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. And you're absolutely right. I moved to start my practice in Tennessee in the fall of '93, and our program, TennCare, was implemented somewhat as an experiment in '94, January '94. So I witnessed it from its inception through what I would call its continuous failure. The program continued to grow and expand, continued, as I think you referenced earlier, as substantiated by Senator Lamar Alexander, has drained our State's educational resources. And it got so bad that, in 2007, Governor Bredesen actually had to remove about 270,000 people from the program just to keep the State from going bankrupt. So clearly, it was an example of how the program and the system does not work and did not work. And that's maybe a glimpse of what we can expect to see moving forward with the President's health care law. So it failed to accomplish its objectives, and just as we would have suspected, the costs grew exponentially.…”