Phil Bredesen

Phil Bredesen is the former Democratic Governor of Tennessee and was a superdelegate in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He is a former healthcare industry executive (he founded HealthAmerica Corporation, an insurance company, which he sold in 1986 for about $385 million), and is currently on the board of directors of Vanguard Health Systems, a $5 billion hospital chain, receiving an annual compensation of $240,005 in 2011.

Ties to Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt"
The Campaign to Fix the Debt is the latest incarnation of a decades-long effort by former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to slash earned benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare under the guise of fixing the nation's "debt problem."

Bredesen is on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. In January 2013, Bredesen admitted that Fix the Debt's strategy was to create an "artificial crisis" to achieve a "grand bargain" on Medicare and Social Security.

This article is part of the Center for Media and Democracy's investigation of Pete Peterson's Campaign to "Fix the Debt." Please visit our main SourceWatch page on Fix the Debt.

Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest
Bredesen is currently on the board of directors of Vanguard Health Systems, a $5 billion hospital chain, receiving an annual compensation of $240,005 in 2011. Vanguard lobbied on federal appropriations issues in the third quarter of 2012. Vanguard's biggest owner is the private equity firm Blackstone Group (Blackstone and its affiliates acquired Vanguard in 2004). Blackstone was co-founded by Fix the Debt funder Pete Peterson. Bredesen has been an investor in a number of healthcare companies in addition to HealthAmerica Corp., including Coventry Health Care (which was recently sold to Aetna for $5.6 billion), First Commonwealth, and Qualifacts Systems Inc. For a time Bredesen was being considered for Health and Human Services secretary in the first Obama administration, but lost out to Kathleen Sebelius. Responding to opposition to his potential appointment from national and Tennessee healthcare advocates, Bredesen told the Wall Street Journal "advocacy groups don't matter nearly as much as the pharmaceutical groups, the hospitals, the doctors' groups. There's a lot of very powerful interest groups that will play in this thing." Bredesen is on the Governor's Council of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which received $400,000 from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in 2011 to fund its Debt Reduction Task Force.

Cutback of Public Health Program
According to Ron Pollack, president of health care advocacy group FamiliesUSA, Bredesen “presided over the largest state cutback of public health programs in the history of our nation, so how can one not be worried about him?” As governor of Tennessee in 2004, Bredesen did away with Tennessee's state health care program, TennCare, and reverted to standard Medicaid, eliminating coverage for 430,000 people, and imposted strict limits on prescription drugs and doctor visits, with no appeals. This resulted in budget surpluses.

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