United Liberty
Phil Bredesen
Problems with Involving Minors in Politics
Fri, 03/23/2012 - 7:32am | posted by George Scoville
Cross-posted from The Dangerous Servant
When I was six or seven years old, a new Nashville resident, I remember vividly going to the Nashville Fair Grounds with my parents to visit the flea market, and our family being approached by campaign volunteers for then-Mayoral candidate Phil Bredesen, a centrist Republican who never won on a Republican ticket until he switched parties years later. He would later become one of Nashville’s most popular Democratic mayors and one of Tennessee’s most popular Democratic governors; on a personal note, he played an instrumental role in bringing my beloved NHL expansion franchise Nashville Predators to the Music City in the late 1990s, and he and former First Lady Andrea Conte were vocal critics of Research in Motion CEO Jim Balsillie’s sneaky, manipulative coup to buy the Predators and relocate them to Hamilton, Ontario in the summer of 2007.
But I digress.
At the fair, we were given and wore white stickers and pin-on buttons that had depicted blue bones with a circle and diagonal bar around and over them; Bredesen’s opponent in that race was a man named Bill Boner.
Has health care reform been successful at the state level?
Thu, 04/08/2010 - 2:05pm | posted by Jason Pye
Over at Reason, Peter Suderman writes about how health care programs in state level have created nothing but headaches for state governments:
As spectacular failures go, it’s hard to do worse than Tennessee. This early state attempt to dramatically increase health coverage, dubbed TennCare, started off promisingly. In 1994, the first year of its operation, the system added half a million new individuals to its rolls. Premiums were cheap—just $2.74 per month for people right above the poverty line—and liberal policy wonks loved it. The Urban Institute, for example, gave it good marks for “improving coverage of the uninsurable or high-risk individuals with very limited access to private coverage.” At its peak, the program covered 1.4 million individuals—nearly a quarter of the state’s population and more than any other state’s Medicaid program—leaving just 6 percent of the state’s population uninsured.
