Nashville Cares files emergency TennCare motion

Email | Print By David A. Fox

11-12-2004 6:14 PM — Attorney George Barrett, on behalf of Nashville Cares and TennCare member Sanford Bloch, filed an emergency motion Friday to intervene in the issue of Gov. Phil Bredesen's plan to scrap TennCare.

The motion actually pertains to legal counsel involved in the Grier lawsuit and consent decree, which has been at the center of much of the state's problem with ballooning expenses, especially from pharmaceuticals.

"It also has been publicly announced that counsel for the plaintiff class and for the state defendants (embodied by the governor) have begun meeting privately with a deadline five days from today to reach some resolution of an impasse to demand by the governor that the present Revised Consent Decree...be either abrogated or greatly modified," the filing states.

The filing then points out that the proposed renegotiation is to involve the plaintiffs' counsel, who simultaneously seeks to represent both the 430,000 persons likley to lose their health insurance if TennCare is scrapped and the 900,000-odd people who will remain covered by Medicaid.

"Proposed plaintiffs-intervenors suggest that this simultaneous representation of fairly obviously divergent (or at least strongly potentially divergent) interests in the renegotiation of the Consent Decree is problematic."

Nashville Cares claims in its court declaration that a return to traditional Medicaid would result in many of the nonprofit's HIV/AIDS clients being dropped from coverage, "including the prescrition coverage of Sanford Bloch."