TennCare Previews Obamacare’s Fiscal Nightmare

Conn Carroll / August 17, 2009

The Wall Street Journal reports today on Tennessee’s experiment with health care reform:

In 1994, Tennessee launched an ambitious public insurance program to cover its uninsured. The plan, TennCare, fulfilled that mission but nearly bankrupted the state in the process.

As originally envisioned, the Tennessee plan expanded Medicaid, the government health-care program for the poor, to cover people who couldn’t afford insurance or who had been denied coverage by an insurance company.

With an initial budget of $2.6 billion, TennCare quickly extended coverage to an additional 500,000 people by making access to its plans easy and affordable. But the program became so expensive that Tennessee was forced to scale it back in 2005. (more…)