Press
Reaction to the Ritz Complaint – Gordon Bonnyman
SpeaktoPower.org
Posted in Commentary By Steve Ross Write
February 17, 2010
We asked several local and state elected officials and activists their reaction to the complaint filed against the State of Tennessee by Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz, but this one stood on it’s own.
Gordon Bonnyman – Tennessee Justice Center – It is too soon to know whether as a legal matter the federal government will view the state’s treatment of The MED as a Civil Rights violation. Unfortunately, it will probably take the feds too long to process Commissioner Ritz’s complaint to be of help in the immediate crisis.
Whether or not it is successful, the complaint for the most part tells it like it is. The state government has been ripping off Shelby County taxpayers and The MED for years, and it has intensified since the TennCare cuts of 2005-2006. Ironically, the greater the uncompensated care burden on The MED, the more money state government makes. That is because the state counts the indigent care delivered by The MED, and
local subsidies provided by Shelby County to the hospital, as state expenditures that qualify for federal Medicaid matching funds.
The state rips off Nashville-Davidson County in the same way, at the expense of Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. To a lesser extent, the same thing happens with Chattanooga and Erlanger Hospital.
The part of the complaint that is not entirely accurate is the assertion that the state sends the money stolen from the public hospitals to private hospitals throughout Tennessee. In fact, the state has been siphoning money — to the tune of over $1 billion over the past 4 years — out of TennCare and using it for entirely unrelated purposes.
The state has played divide-and-conquer for many years, pitting rural against urban communities, Memphis against Nashville, East TN against West TN, etc. The mindset in the Bredesen Administration has been to run the state like private business, which sounds good but isn’t. It reflects a competitive, “I will look out for my company’s bottom line, and everyone else is on their own” approach to public policy. That means costs and deficits get shoved off onto local government, indigent care gets shifted to private hospitals and added to the bills of insured patients, and ordinary Tennesseans suffer. The state accrues large Rainy Day and TennCare reserves, gets kudos from the bond rating houses on Wall Street, and state politicians get bragging rights about their prudent financial management. But it is at the expense of Tennessee communities, as The MED’s dilemma demonstrates.
The answer is for local governments to make common cause and demand that the legislature get the state’s priorities straight.
