• Beginning April 1, enrollees must use providers in their assigned new managed care organization; and
• If the enrollee wants to change from Amerigroup to AmeriChoice or vice versa, then the enrollee has to request this change by May 16.

On March 26, 2007, Amerigroup or AmeriChoice were told by TennCare to send new letters to their assigned enrollees. These letters said that beginning April 1, the enrollees can continue to see their current TennCare Select providers for up to 90 days. This sounds good but there are two problems:

• Because of this change, more providers may wait 90 days before they decide whether or not to sign-up with one or both of these new managed care organizations.
• The new managed care organizations (MCOs) did not remind enrollees in this last letter that if they need to change MCOs so they could keep their doctors, they still have to request this change before May 16.

TennCare Bureau should be ensuring that the rights of the enrollees are maintained. However, these letters ignore the rights that enrollees have to make a real choice. The MCOs are being paid a fixed dollar amount per enrollee per month. This current process will delay care and, in some cases, deny care. That allows the MCO's to pocket millions during this transition period.

The process is misleading and may cause thousands of enrollees to lose their providers if they do not understand that they must make their change by May 16 even though they can continue to see their TennCare Select provider until June 30.

Take Action Now!

Call your state senator and state representative and tell them that TennCare must extend the period for changing MCOs to June 30th, instead of May 16th. To find your state legislators' contact information, go to http://www.legislature.state.tn.us/

• interview Kyle Davis about Medicare Part D;
• discuss why Tennessee needs a Health Care Study Commission;
• talk about what other states are doing; and
• give you the latest on TennCare and Cover Tennessee.

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Take care,

Tony Garr, tgarr@thcc2.org

Tennessee Health Care Campaign

1103 Chapel Ave., Nashville, TN 37206