Leadership
Gordon Bonnyman, Jr.
Executive Director
Mr. Bonnyman has practiced poverty law since 1973. For three decades, he has represented the uninsured and Medicaid patients in their efforts to access medical care. He has served on advisory panels, consulted with legislators and governors, and testified before Congress on health policies affecting the poor and underserved.
Michele Johnson
Managing Attorney
Ms. Johnson has, for over a decade, focused her advocacy on health care for low-income children and families on the TennCare program. As lead counsel, she negotiated a class action settlement, John B. v. Goetz, requiring comprehensive reform of health care for over 500,000 TennCare children. She continues to work to enforce its protections.
Organization’s Objective
Tennessee is the epicenter of the national struggle for health justice. Tennessee corporate ventures, like Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), have led the transformation of health care from a human service to a profit-making commodity. Personal wealth derived from entrepreneurial health care ventures has translated into political power, and Tennessee is led by officials who made their fortunes as health care entrepreneurs.
Close personal and financial relationships tie state officials to the powerful HMOs that run TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program for the poor. When lax management by the HMOs led to budget problems, instead of holding TennCare contractors accountable, state officials cut people from the program.
Within the past two years, Tennessee has experienced the deepest Medicaid cuts ($1.9 billion annually) in the nation’s history, resulting in a measurable increase in deaths among the 200,000 who lost coverage. (See http://www.familiesusa.org/tenncare-report.html.) Tennessee has been the only state without a State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), leaving us with the most limited health coverage for uninsured children. Key state legislators face imprisonment for accepting bribes from TennCare contractors, but the contractors’ influence is undiminished.
Advocacy by the Tennessee Justice Center and its consumer coalition partners prompted officials to finally establish an SCHIP for uninsured children not eligible for TennCare. However, the new program, known as CoverKids, has restrictive eligibility rules and obstacles to enrollment that have held participation to token levels. 140,000 Tennessee children remain uninsured.
The 650,000 low-income children enrolled in TennCare depend on the state’s HMO contractors for their medical and mental health care. The quality of that care has repeatedly been found by the courts to violate federal Medicaid standards, sometimes with deadly consequences. Many TennCare children, including most children in the state’s troubled foster care system, have special medical or mental health needs. Political cronyism remains a dominant force that keeps those needs from being met.
TJC will achieve the following reforms:
• Reforming CoverKids so that it covers more kids and provides an adequate package of medical and mental health benefits.
• Requiring TennCare and its contractors to meet federal quality standards for children.
