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Lamar Calls Out Medicare Expansion

By Kleinheider Posted on November 17, 2009 at 3:15 pm

He says it will bankrupt the states:

“I picked up my newspaper in Nashville on Sunday morning, and here was the headline: ‘Governor Bredesen Faces Painful Choices as Tennessee Begins Budget Triage.’ That’s the sort of talk you usually reserve for an emergency room. I have said several times that any senator who votes to expand Medicaid and transfer the costs on to the states ought to be sentenced to go home and serve as governor for a few years and try to implement the Medicaid program which is bankrupting states and forcing funding cuts that will ruin public higher education.”

• “The Governor has told his department heads to present him with suggestions for budget cuts of 6 percent … Chas Sisk, writing in the Tennessean yesterday, says Tennessee may release 4,000 nonviolent felons—people possibly convicted of drug-dealing and robbery, under a plan outlined Monday by Tennessee’s Department of Correction to deal with the state’s budget crisis …”

• “So, how in the world, in light of these conditions, could we even think about a provision in the health care bill that would add tens of billions of dollars in new costs to the states, which are in their worst fiscal condition since the Great Depression? That’s called an ‘unfunded mandate.’”

Full floor remarks here.

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Comments

7 Responses to “Lamar Calls Out Medicare Expansion”

  1. Donna Locke writes
    November 17th, 2009 3:37 pm

    If we don’t bring manufacturing back to this country, I don’t see how we can address the other tiers of this economic situation. Factory jobs are not the most fun or pleasant, but the “service economy” ain’t gonna get it.

  2. Davy writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:01 pm

    “If we don’t bring manufacturing back to this country, I don’t see how we can address the other tiers of this economic situation. Factory jobs are not the most fun or pleasant, but the “service economy” ain’t gonna get it.”

    I agree.

    But now the manufacturing demand and money is in the high tech sector.

    And we aren’t putting out math experts by the truckload these days.

    The steel and textile industries are gone for good.

    Them things we’re typing on, that’s the future.

  3. Donna Locke writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:05 pm

    Again I say we don’t have to wait for an industry to return or come to us. Let’s gotta be startin’ somethin’.

  4. Loveforsale writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:08 pm

    Please learn the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. Thank you.

  5. Emmett Flatus writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:18 pm

    Not sure what you mean, Lovie. As I understand it, the House’s proposed health reform would put the currently uninsured in the state-funded Medicaid programs not under federal Medicare.

  6. Donna Locke writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:20 pm

    Apparently, they have some kind of policy here about corrections, as in, don’t. I do wish errors in the headlines would be corrected. Just correct spelling errors and typos the usual way and draw a line through the other errors before correcting. That way, you won’t be deleting anything you want to preserve against future accusations.

  7. Dru writes
    November 17th, 2009 4:29 pm

    Health care policy professor and Rep. Jim Cooper says (Tennessean, Nov. 15 2009)the Feds now pay 67 percent of Tennessee’s Medicaid bills. Cooper also says the Feds will pay 91 percent of the Medicaid expansion. What a deal! Where does the Senator get his information? Maybe he should sit in on Rep. Cooper’s health care policy class at Vandy.

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