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The co-founder of Home Depot just spent $200 million on the Georgia Aquarium. But as staggering as that sounds, Nashville has its own philanthropic wellspring. Martha Ingram alone kicked in $30 million for Nashville’s new symphony hall. Andrea Conte has raised millions to rehabilitate the Executive Residence. Vanderbilt is on the receiving end of so much beneficence that it buys up real estate like candy. Nashvillians fund countless nonprofits that do everything from clean up neighborhoods to rehabilitate wildlife to mentor at-risk kids—and all of these efforts rake in tens of millions of dollars from the rich and ordinary citizens alike.
Here’s to orchestras, owls and miscellaneous do-gooding.
But if Nashville is this capable of funding the arts and tree planting, why couldn’t we as a state create what essentially would be an adopt-a-former-TennCare-patient program? The goal would be twofold: 1) to register protest against the effective dismantling of the state’s health care program for the poor and uninsurable (see “Faces of TennCare ”) and 2) to do a little good in the process.
We haven’t suspended our critical faculties. It’s clear that the sheer numbers involved with trying to bankroll health care coverage for some 200,000 Tennesseans who have been dropped from TennCare are much too daunting to be wholly mitigated by citizen protest. No one could possibly be so idealistic as to think that private citizens rising up would be able to pay for the health care of each of these unfortunate citizens (though if you’ve got any ideas about how to create a $2 billion endowment, we’d like to hear them). Moreover, we believe philosophically that it’s the duty of government to help those who cannot help themselves, especially when it is government that has played such a notorious role in the inflationary costs of health care.
But we’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street enough times to think that goodwill can go a long way, especially this time of year. What we propose is a project whose message probably would be more imposing and impactful, not to mention longer term, than the side benefits of someone getting the meds they need or the surgery they require. But the latter wouldn’t be too shabby either.
Gov. Phil Bredesen isn’t the devil, as someone quoted in our cover story this week suggests. But neither do we think he’s handled this colossal problem well. Instead of undertaking the TennCare problem like a surgeon with a scalpel, he’s taken a chainsaw to it. Maybe a statewide, nonpartisan citizen campaign could help stop the bloodshed.
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