Tennessee Rejects an ObamaCare Exchange

Yet another state seems poised to lure employers away from Mississippi. Excerpts from Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s press release:

Tennessee faces a decision this week about health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.


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 health care in our country. It only expands a broken system…


Since the presidential election, we’ve received 800‐​plus pages of draft rules from the federal government, 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.


In weighing all of the information we currently have, I informed the federal government today that Tennessee will not run a state‐​based exchange. If conditions warrant 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.