Tenn Gov. on the fence about state insurance exchange

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) announced the state will not operate a state-based healthcare exchange under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

“Tennessee faces a decision this week about health insurance exchanges created by the PPACA," he said in a statement on his website. “I'm not a fan of the law. The more I know, the more harmful I think it will be for small businesses and costly for state governments and the federal government. It does nothing to address the cost of healthcare in our country. It only expands a broken system. That’s why I’ve opposed it from the beginning and had hoped we would be successful in court and at the ballot box this year.

The deadline to decide whether the state or the federal government will run the insurance exchange is Dec. 14. “I've said that I think Tennessee could run a state exchange cheaper and better, and my natural inclination is to keep the federal government out of our business as much as possible. What our administration has been working to understand is whether we'd have the flexibility for it to be a true state-based exchanged, how the data exchange would work, and if it would work."

Haslam said his office has received more than 800 pages of draft rules from the federal government since the Nov. 6 election, "some of which actually limit state decisions about running an exchange more than we expected. The Obama administration has set an aggressive timeline to implement exchanges, while there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the process will actually work. What has concerned me more and more is that they seem to be making this up as they go."

If "conditions warrant it in the future and it makes sense at a later date for Tennessee to run the exchange, we would consider that as an option at the appropriate time."