Nashville News Blog

Gov. Phil Bredesen talks to Politico today in what amounts to a job interview for secretary of health and human services. Wonder if the governor planned it that way? Oh no, we forgot. He's not lobbying for that job. But he tells Politico he's still in the running for it. He's "Short List" Phil, after all. He gives his ideas for health-care reform and trots out this dubious, unchallenged defense of his dismantling of TennCare.

When I came in as governor, we had a program that was a total disaster. We had the highest percentage of our people on Medicaid. The annual growth in the program was about the same as the annual growth in the revenues of the state of Tennessee. We were running it through these [managed care organizations] which were basically bankrupt. I mean, they couldn't pay their bills, doctors weren't getting - the whole thing was just basically near collapse. And I tried for about a year to kind of work in concert with these advocacy groups to make some changes ... [That] was unsuccessful, and in the end [I] just did what I had to do to fix the program, to keep it from bankrupting the state.

There were dire predictions of, you know, there'd be bodies stacked up in the streets or something like that. Nothing like that happened. It has worked fine. The program is totally under control at the moment.

I don't have any regrets. I did the only thing I could do. My job is to run the state and not let it go bankrupt. But I think, for anybody that takes the time to look at it, it was kind of what we had to do.