Phil Bredesen, Corporate Pedophile


Imagination Library Week

When Skeptical Brotha regular Zeitgiest9000 posted yesterday that the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder is reporting that the Obama Administration is vetting Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen for Secretary of Health and Human Services, my head exploded. I damn near stroked out, y’all. A diehard Hillarycrat, this is his transparent way of saying that we would have been better off with the Queen of Triangulation, and by extension, her approach to health care reform. I don’t know if that’s true, but if Barack Obama gives a mutha%$#*ing bastard like Phil Bredesen the reins of HHS, I do know we’ll all wish we had been volunteer slaves on the Clintons neo-liberal plantation.

Placing Governor Bredesen in charge of the Administration’s health care reform effort is analogous to giving a pedophile unfettered access to children. At least an establishment tool like Tom Daschle has a few scruples left; a capitalist pig like Phil Bredesen has none. It’s my moral obligation to sound the alarm so that this capitalist piggy screams “wee, wee, wee,” all the way home.

I know what you’re thinking. “Damn, Skeptical Brotha has gone off his meds.” If you must know, I ain’t on no meds, at least not for that, but if I were, and I depended on Tennessee’s Medicaid program, for example, a mutha%$#*a like Phil Bredesen would be rationing my sh*t to “2 name brand drugs and 3 generic prescription drugs monthly, the lowest in the country.” This is done without any regard for the maladies people have or what doctors say their patients need. Thanks be to Gawd that my therapist thinks my depression is situational and not clinical. That is a conversation for another day and I need to stay on task.

Let me be clear so there can be no misunderstanding. Phil Bredesen is a corporate pedophile whose unconscionable greed as a former HMO executive made him a multimillionaire and unscrupulous politician who elects to balance Tennessee’s state budget on the backs of sick children and vulnerable adults by using the spurious pretext of cost to deny them access to proper medical care.

Old habits die hard and Bredesen’s unconscionable greed was made manifest by the deliberate denial of medical care to an unsuspecting public covered by his HMO. His private sector “success,” in turn, made him the type of slimy prick the corporate power structure encourages to run for public office. He began his career as the Mayor of Nashville and subsequently became Tennessee’s Governor. If I do this right, he’ll never receive a cabinet appointment in the Obama Administration because of his shameful record as the business lobby’s nefarious servant directing the state of Tennessee to follow his callous and right-wing business model.

Before Bredesen eff’ed it up, TennCare was the most generous and cost-effective Medicaid program in the country. Not only did it cover indigent care, its intended function, it also drew down ample federal subsidies to expand coverage to adults who couldn’t gain access to health coverage because of pre-existing conditions or prohibitive cost. The subsidies kept hospitals and clinics operating in areas that provided essential care to the isolated rural poor and reduced the rate of uninsured to one of the lowest in the country. The program operated in the black until a Republican governor started messing with it. Bredesen was (s)elected by the power structure in 2002 to finish the job.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund wrote to the Governor in 2004 about their fear that Bredesen’s “reforms” would give the state or its contractors “sole discretion to decide whether a service is covered, without meaningful regard to widely accepted standards of medical care or appropriate deference to the professional judgment of the treating physician.”

“…This invites physicians and/or the TennCare Bureau and its contractors to apply a standard of care to an already vulnerable population that could threaten a patient’s health and cause ‘life-threatening consequences.”

Given the terrible way in which the black poor were and continue to be treated and the fact that forty percent of the African American population of Tennessee was dependent on the state’s Medicaid program for basic access to medical care; a number, which included at least 50 percent of black children, the NAACP’s fears were well founded.

Bredesen ignored the concerns of his detractors and they sued the hell out of the state. They attempted to make the Governor and his minions accountable for a draconian, bare bones Medicaid program that cut over two hundred thousand elderly and disabled people off from assistance they formerly received resulting in “an increase in preventable deaths by a rate that equals an additional death every 30 hours.”

A federal Court found in 2001 that the state and its managed care contractors were systematically violating quality of care standards governing the treatment of low-income TennCare children, including those in the state’s troubled foster care system. There was extensive evidence that children suffered serious harm as a result of those violations. In 2006, state officials claimed to have fixed the problems. But a panel of court-appointed monitors issued a lengthy report last year (2007) finding that the state had not proven that claim, and there remained evidence of widespread problems.

In June last year, a federal appeals court authorized a computer expert to determine whether the Bredesen Administration had altered computer records to evade court orders to produce records documenting the state’s systematic denials of care to 650,000 children covered by the state’s Medicaid program. According to the Tennessee Justice Center, “the Governor and other officials disclosed that they had used Bredesen’s personal email system and their personal computers for state business. They claimed that by putting the public records on personal computers, officials could shield them from inspection.”

Bredesen’s heartlessness is borne out by numerous horror stories documented by Families USA:

Could you sleep at night if your budget cuts eliminated an elderly woman from receiving treatment for schizophrenia and lung cancer?

Could you cancel a prostate cancer operation for an elderly senior living on less than $1000 a month just days before the procedure?

Could you look at yourself in the mirror if you prevented anyone suffering from emphysema or some other respiratory condition from getting round-the-clock oxygen?

Could you face the public knowing that you cut off insulin dependent diabetics from their medication?

Phil Bredesen can because he is a monster. The cumulative impact of his evil is unfathomable. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Republicans vote for him or why my favorite neo-liberal ass clown’s at the New Republic fetishize his massive cruelty.

Any sentient Democrat who believes that a bastard like Phil Bredesen merits consideration for Barack Obama’s cabinet should be fitted for a straight jacket and locked away forever in a padded cell. I am compelled to write today. I am ringing the bell and sounding the alarm. Let the word go forth, from this time and place, that the progressive blogosphere finds a Bredesen appointment totally unacceptable. It is the highest insult for progressives for him to even be vetted by this Administration. His appointment would be a stench in the nostrils of God and a sick joke on the most vulnerable among us, especially sick and disabled children and adults, like the elderly and the uninsured, the people his green eyeshades target as the expendable poor that are socially acceptable to kill.