Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen reflected on his political career to a group of students participating in Girls State at Lipscomb University:
Bredesen said one of his biggest regrets as governor was that he wasn't able to make good on a campaign promise to fix TennCare, the state's expanded Medicaid program.
"That didn't work so well for a couple of reasons: Washington was impenetrable and impossible to work with, and the TennCare situation was very caught up with some advocacy groups," he said. "I tried to work for a couple of years with both them and Washington, and I got absolutely nowhere."
"I heard from Democrats around the state basically explaining to me that I was a footnote, that not only was I not going to be re-elected as governor, but that I would probably not win the Democratic primary," Bredesen said.
I find it interesting that Bredesen believes that his failure to "fix" TennCare was his biggest disappointment while in office. Governor Bredesen very likely came to the conclusion that you can't fix what cannot be repaired. The "advocacy groups" he was dealing with were well-intentioned, but they were representing patients on a short-term (i.e. "right here and now") basis, rather than truly examining the long-term viability of the program to insure that it could survive. In order to survive as it was intended to be, TennCare needed to be reformed-and those groups used the legal and political systems to resist any attempts to bring costs under control, and Washington's medding in the situation didn't help.
Bredesen's decisions about the fate of TennCare were some of the most controversial ones he ever made as Governor-yet he leaves office as one of the most popular Governors in Tennessee history.
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