Information Alert: Tennessee Governor Pledges Support of Community-based Services

In the State of the State Address January 28th, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen made the following remarks regarding the long battle over the institutional bias in TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid managed-care program that provides health coverage for 1.2 million low-income children, pregnant women and people with disabilities, with an annual budget of $7 billion.

NCIL would like to formally congratulate the hundreds of Tennesseans and advocates nationwide who continue to demand that the institutional bias come to an end.  It’s time to break the strangle-hold of the nursing home lobby on support for people with significant disabilities!  We stand with the Tennesseans who told the Governor that we will not be served in institutions at the expense of our freedom.  Let’s hold the Governor to his word:

Governor Bredesen, State of the State Address, January, 2008

Finally, I'd like to talk this evening about a promise that I've made and not yet kept-expanding alternatives to nursing homes for our elderly and disabled residents, the so-called home and community based services.  Tennessee usually ranks dead last among the states in alternatives to nursing homes.

This is the year I want to fix that, this is the year I want to fulfill my promise.

In the months ahead, with your help, we are going to fundamentally restructure how long term care is handled in our TennCare program, and it will be a much better and more humane program as a result. Eligibility is slow today; we are going to speed it up. We need to make it easier to stay at home with more home and community-based services. We need more residential alternatives to nursing homes and we need more consumer-directed options such as allowing the consumer to select or even employ his or her own caregivers.

These are not just goals, we will present you with the "Long Term Care Community Choices Act of 2008" to restructure legislatively this part of TennCare, and TennCare itself will be making changes in conjunction with this to open the doors to a richer set of choices for our citizens.

We cannot of course put significant new dollars into long term care this year. What we will do is to restructure what we have, and provide a framework for the future in much the same way as we did with the BEP last year. We will not do this independently, but in consultation with members of the legislature, with the industry itself, and with citizens who have been calling for changes in long term care for a long time.

There is a growth in my own personal understanding here. It becomes plainer to me every day that our state has so many citizens who are elderly and who are beginning to deal with the reality that they can no longer do everything for themselves in quite the way they did twenty years ago. Our state is full of the children and grandchildren of these citizens who want the best for them, and are looking for ways to accomplish that.

And most personally, I know my mother is watching this proceeding tonight, and she still hasn't stopped teaching me. I want to say to her, Mom, I've seen how much you want to be in your own home; I know how difficult that would have been a few times these past couple of years without some help;  I know that not everyone has a granddaughter like you do who can give that help.

My job is to open more doors to alternatives here in Tennessee. If you want to stay in your home, if it makes sense to do so, this is the year we're going to start making it easier.

From our good friends at ADAPT.